By Mojisola Obazuaye,
PARROTS MEDIA CAREER SPECIALIST
Conflict of Interest! ❌
Your Side Gig & Your Job
Let me start out by saying, except of course you are representing your organisation, don’t use their brand identity to market your product, service or your personal brand.
It is that simple and a lot of times, there is a policy around it.
Let’s dig in….
It is not a secret that I have
📍 A Day Job where I am employed by an organisation.
📍 A Coaching/Consultancy business where I am the Principal Consultant.
When People invite me to event for example speaking, they tend to put my work identity on their program.
I go back, correct it and put my personal brand identity on it. Why?
Except I am representing my organisation, I shouldn’t use the brand to promote anything that is my business. It is a conflict, one that can lead to disciplinary action. In fact, I lead demonstrating those policies to new joiners when they join our organisation.
📍 Here is another one
Some organisations are happy for you to have a small business and blend that with your personal brand. My current organisation does. Still, you can’t use their brand to market yours.
You can say something like, I work for a Fortune 100 organisation where I am the Director of Operations for eg.
📍 Some companies don’t want you to have any side business because they believe that you would take their time to do your business. My previous organisation wasn’t open to this. It was one of the reasons I was keen to leave and took a bow when redundancy presented itself and why I chose my current.
📍 Here is what to consider before signing a new job offer, if you are Entrepreneural in spirit like me:
1. Find out if side hustles are conflict in this organisation.
2. Can you talk about your personal brand on the same platform where you are linked with your employer, eg Linkedln.
3. If your employer were to know what you do outside of work, can they leverage the skill. For example, you saw the Digital App I helped my organisation launch as a business and not as an employee. Also my attendance to their event as my brand not as employee.
4. Can you use your business skills on your job.
For example, one quick way I stood out after joining my organisation was helping my team create and edit videos in my week 2 of joining them. Nobody in their HR has that skill. I used it in a global firm presenting to a global audience.
I got popular for this alone and shined with delivering my business objectives.
You get it?
📍 If your organisation frowns at side hustles but you love the organisation, you can:
1. Use a different platform where you are not linked to your employer. For example, Instagram, Facebook etc
2. Don’t talk about your side gig with friends and colleagues at work.
3. Be a high performer at work. Let your work speak for itself.
4. Don’t try to force your idea of having side gigs as an agenda at work.
The world is moving away from traditional way of working and employers are beginning to see employers as entrepreneurs rather than employees.
Google for example encourages side hustles. A YouTube Creator I know moved from Software Engineering to Creator at Google using her YouTube Creator experience. She still does her Creator Business as a YouTuber.
📍 A few more tips:
1. When you have a side hustle and share on platforms where you are linked to your employer, don’t share during your working hours. Use early mornings, late evenings and weekends. It helps create the impression that you are doing your side hustle in your personal time and not your contracted working hours.
2. Also ensure that you use your personal laptop for your side gigs as your work tools are meant for your job. In case of monitoring of devices.
3. Remain professional in your engagement in your shared socials with your employer
4. Apply wisdom always.
📍 What is your experience of working a corporate job and side hustles/gigs/entrepreneurship? Please share.
Follow me Mojisola Obazuaye for Career & Life Changing Motivation.
📍 For Career Coaching, Interview Preparation, Professional CV Writing, OR Struggling to Find a job/close gigs/ monetise your talent, read Parrots UG every Wednesday with expertise articles from careen consultants.
By Mojisola Obazuaye, the author is a Career coach and HR consultant, E-mail: info@mojisolaobazuaye.com
