Remote work began as an emergency lifeline during COVID, but quickly turned into a shell game for many employees (though not all, of course), writes Howard Levitt. (Credit: Jacob Wackerhausen)
Autonomy is seductive. Roll out of bed, skip the commute, wear sweatpants and work when the inspiration strikes, answering only to your conscience.
For many, it seems like corporate liberation. It is the dream, until the mask slips and reality bites.
Well, the mask of remote work has slipped, and the reality is far less romantic: it has become the perfect incubator — the Petri dish — for deception.
What began as an emergency lifeline during COVID — a mark of resilience, ingenuity — quickly turned into a shell game for many employees (though not all, of course).
Some secretly collected multiple paycheques, working two or three “full-time” jobs simultaneously. Others ran side hustles during business hours. And many simply vanished, surfacing briefly for Zoom calls like reluctant extras in a play they no longer wished to star in.
When the pandemic first forced employers’ hands, they had little choice but to surrender control, telling employees: “work when you want, where you want, how you want.” And for a while, productivity didn’t collapse. Slack pings replaced watercooler chatter. Executives congratulated themselves on “reinventing the workplace.”
But utopias rarely survive contact with reality. And reality was this: remote work quickly became a camouflage for dishonesty.
Employees double-dipped. They pocketed full-time salaries for part-time effort. And when managers needed them? They got radio silence — or the familiar “frozen screen” gambit.
Consider the case of Soham Parekh, Silicon Valley’s cautionary tale. The young, Mumbai-based software engineer was outed this summer for simultaneously juggling jobs with multiple startups while collecting full-time pay. He didn’t just double dip; he gorged himself at the buffet.
One by one, his employers discovered his infidelity and fired him, but there was always another company willing to hire. Parekh said he did it out of financial necessity. It’s hard not to see it as theft in a hoodie; a betrayal dressed in the garb of ingenuity.
Employers, caught flat-footed, leaned on trust. But trust is not a workplace policy; it is a liability. And trust without oversight is a time bomb.
Courts do not reward naïveté. Once breached, misplaced trust and dishonesty, even in pixels, leaves a company exposed unless its evidence is airtight. The law is brutally simple: proven dishonesty can be just cause for dismissal, without a penny of severance. But suspicions, however strong, are legally worthless. Fire on a hunch and you’re not firing a dishonest employee — you are firing blind and gifting them a severance windfall and legal fees.
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To establish cause, employers need hard evidence: performance logs, timestamps, missed deliverables, falsified records, client complaints, digital trails — something tangible a judge can sink their teeth into. Without it, the “dishonest” employee walks away the victor, while the employer is branded incompetent.
Remote work was never the “revolution” its evangelists promised. It was a stopgap, a patch — and like all patches, it eventually peeled off, exposing the broken model beneath.
So, what is an employer to do if they wish to continue remote work?
Here is the practical — and legal — prescription:
Audit outcomes, not hours. Transparency is not optional. Daily check-ins, tracked deliverables and documented progress are not micromanagement; they are survival.
Codify expectations. Availability, deliverables and check-in requirements must be in black and white.
Enforce exclusivity. Contracts must explicitly prohibit double-dipping — and those clauses must be enforced.
Conduct random audits. You wouldn’t let cashiers handle tills without oversight. Why let remote employees handle your business unsupervised?
When trust is broken, act only with proof. Document meticulously. Then move decisively.
Otherwise, employers should face the inevitable: either bring your people back to the office or resign yourself to paying ghosts.
Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, employment and labour lawyers with offices in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. He practices employment law in eight provinces and is the author of six books, including the Law of Dismissal in Canada.