By side hustles, we mean working on any other professional or paid jobs outside of your work at Talented. It’s not a black and white topic. There are one-time gigs, other pursuits, long term entrepreneurial ambitions or opportunities that help you grow and make life interesting. We want to support that. But we also want to make sure that professional endeavours outside of Talented don’t create conflicts of interest or affect your time, dedication, or performance at Talented. So, it’s a delicate balance.

With that in mind, here are some examples of what we’d consider OK and what we would consider a conflict of interest and not so OK:

What’s OK

• An occasional side gig, free or paid, for someone you know. For example, if you want to work on a friend’s website, or a design or writing project for something you’re involved with, that’s fine
• An occasional speaking gig, free or paid. Someone’s going to pay you to give a talk somewhere? That’s fine as long as it doesn’t involve multiple days off for travel (unless you use your own personal vacation time)
• A side business that’s different from your day job, as long as the commitment is only a few hours a week. If you come to work exhausted because you’re trying to start a full-time business on the side, it’s going to impact your performance here
• Serve as an advisor for another company, or be on a board, as long as there’s no conflict of interest. The time commitment must be under a few hours a month. And if there’s a scheduling conflict, Talented gets priority
• Do volunteer or occasional pro-bono work for a cause you’re actively involved with. A little work here and there is fine, but, for example, becoming an organization’s full-time web designer and being on the hook to work during your standard work day, etc, would not be OK.

What’s not OK

• You can’t work full time or part time for another company in our industry. If you’re unclear about what our industry is, and you have a specific situation you’d like to talk about, do have a conversation with your team lead
• Consult for other companies in our industry where there may be a conflict of interest (a competitor, a product tangentially related to Talented, etc.)
• Be aggressive in marketing your availability for side work. If something comes to you through a friend or some connection, fine, but aggressively promoting something on the side will ultimately result in a conflict of interest here at work
• Take on anything outside of work that’ll pull attention from work. For example, if you wanted to launch an app, but the app requires providing timely customer support to people who use the app, that’s going to eat into your day here at work. That would ultimately be a problem.

Here are a few guiding principles about whether something could be a problem:

• Is it competitive?
• Does it occupy a disproportionate amount of your time?
• Is it affecting your day to day work in the sense that it’s interrupting work that concerns other team mates at talented
• Does it require you to be away during times when you’re needed at work?
• Is it another paid gig that employs the same skills Talented is paying you for?