Telecommuting: Some no longer hesitate to outsource behind the boss’s back
The health crisis has forced companies to adapt and switch to teleworking. And even today, even though the majority of COVID-19 restrictions have disappeared, many companies continue to allow their employees to work from home. Others have opted for a hybrid model that mixes remote work and face-to-face.
Teleworking has many advantages as it can enable a better balance between personal and professional life. And the employees are also happy that they don’t have to drive to their place of work every day.
Numerous studies have been conducted on this subject. For example, in May we released a report from the National Productivity Council that suggested employee productivity has increased thanks to telecommuting.
“Unlike many previous crises that resulted in a slowdown in trend productivity, the health crisis-related acceleration in the use of telecommuting could ultimately result in lasting productivity gains.”indicates the CNP.
But teleworking does not only have advantages. On the employee side, working conditions can also deteriorate. And what’s more, another study suggests that European workers are starting to get bored.
And as for employers, they may have trouble checking their employees’ work. In addition, a new breed of fraud has emerged with telecommuting: employees outsourcing their tasks to freelancers in order to have free time or to work multiple jobs at the same time.
Teleworkers outsource their tasks
At the moment we do not have precise data on this phenomenon. However, this is highlighted in a recent article published on the Business Insider website.
In this article, BI shares the testimony of a Pakistani cloud computing specialist who received an offer on the Upwork freelance platform. This suggestion came from a German employee who worked for a chip manufacturer.
When the Pakistani asked for technical details, the company gave him confidential documents and a login and password that allowed access to that company’s network. Eventually, sensing something was wrong, he turned down the job.
He posted his statement on the Reddit forum and was surprised to read many comments from other freelancers who had already received similar suggestions. Basically it’s common.
And it’s not just an impression. The phenomenon would be widespread in technical fields and especially among developers. This explains Cameron Edwards, Vice President of the American personnel agency Malten Silver, which specializes in digital.
According to Business Insider, this suggests that they’re generally people who work for large companies in the United States or Europe with high salaries and outsource tasks to freelancers living in low-income, lower-paying countries.
The problem is that this outsourcing is done without the knowledge of the employer and unauthorized third parties can gain access to confidential information or even sensitive user data.
The phenomenon is not new. But reported cases have increased over the past two years, according to Cameron Edwards.
There are signs in companies that employees who outsource the tasks assigned to them can recognize: for example, when the employee’s account logs in with a suspicious IP address (thousands of kilometers away from their usual location).
Smarter, a computer scientist who paid $90,000, caused a stir by developing a script that automated his work and allowed him to stay at his desk for just 10 minutes a day.
“In about a week I was able to write, debug and perfect a simple script that does all of my work. It basically scans the local hard drive for new files, generates hashes for them, uploads them to the cloud, and then generates hashes again for fidelity.he explained on social networks.
