A third of your people have a second job
Fatigue management assumes it knows how many hours a person worked this week. For a third of your workforce, it does not.
Gallagher’s Workplace Wellbeing Index: Financial Edition found that a third of employees hold a second job. Among those who do, 29% use the income for everyday living costs and a further 16% to manage debt. Among workers under 34, the proportion holding a second job rises to 39%.
The wellbeing figure attached to it is the one worth pausing on. Workers relying on second-job income report emotional exhaustion at 49%, against 28% of workers without a second job.
The methodology: 3,598 employees across Australia and New Zealand, blended, with no Australia-only split published, so this cannot be described as an Australian figure. Fieldwork December to January. Gallagher sells workplace financial wellbeing and benefits programs, which belongs in the sentence whenever the number is used.
Why this one belongs in a WHS conversation rather than a wellbeing one
Because it undermines a control you are already relying on.
Fatigue management is built on hours. Rostering rules, shift spacing, maximum consecutive days, break periods, and in higher-risk settings a fatigue risk management system with actual numbers in it. Every one of those instruments assumes the hours it can see are the hours the person worked.
For a third of employees, they are not. And the organisation has no visibility of the rest, because there is no mechanism through which it would learn.
That is not a hypothetical exposure. A person who finishes a shift with you and starts another elsewhere is arriving at their next shift with you carrying load that your roster says they do not have. In an office that shows up as a poorer decision. On a site, around plant, or behind a wheel, it shows up differently.
And nobody is going to tell you
This is where it interacts with everything else on this blog.
Disclosing a second job to an employer carries obvious risk - real or perceived, and perceived is enough. It can look like divided loyalty. It can raise questions about conflict of interest. In some contracts it is a policy breach. And it is an unambiguous signal that the person’s income from you is not sufficient for their circumstances, which is not a thing most people volunteer to the organisation that sets their pay.
So the ordinary employee response is to say nothing. Which means the exposure is not just unmeasured, it is actively suppressed by the structure of the employment relationship.
What can actually be done
Not much, if the goal is to find out who. That is a dead end and pursuing it will damage trust faster than anything else in this territory.
Three things that do work.
Check whether your fatigue policy is written as though the hours you roster are the hours worked. Most are. A policy that acknowledges external work exists, without requiring disclosure of it, is a materially different document from one that assumes it away.
Make self-declared fitness for duty genuinely costless. If saying “I am not right for this task today” is career-affecting, nobody will say it, and the mechanism you are relying on is decorative. This costs nothing to fix and almost nobody does it properly.
Look at your own pay and hours data before you look anywhere else. Where second jobs cluster, they cluster around insufficient or unpredictable income. Part-time roles with variable hours, junior bands, and rosters that cannot be planned around are where the pressure to take a second job is generated. Some of that is within your control and some is not, but you cannot tell which until you have looked.
The pattern underneath
A second job is not a lifestyle choice for most of the people holding one. It is a response to a shortfall, and it converts a private financial problem into an operational risk that sits on your site, in your vehicle, on your roster - and appears nowhere in your data.
The wellbeing framing calls this an exhaustion issue. The accurate framing is that a third of your workforce may be operating at a fatigue level your controls were never calibrated for, and the reason you cannot see it is that you designed a relationship in which telling you would be unwise.
Find out whether you would currently see it
The Financial Pressure Pulse Check is twelve questions and about four minutes. It maps how much pressure is likely moving through your workforce against how well set up you are to see it, and gives you your position on both.
