The fear of the invisible employee

I have to admit something: despite genuinely loving my work, I am definitely not a workaholic.

I work my hours, I care deeply about what I do, but I am also profoundly grateful for the moment the day ends and my own time begins. Dinner with my husband. A good workout. Watching the TV show of the moment. The quiet pleasure of not being “on” anymore.

That is probably why I was so fascinated when I recently stumbled upon a viral story about a woman named Rachel Dorn, supposedly fired after secretly working three full-time remote jobs at once.

The story was incredibly detailed. Rachel, a 41-year-old from Washington DC, allegedly earned $347,000 across three companies while managing overlapping meetings with a sophisticated setup she called “The Rotation”: three monitors, color-coded calendars, custom shortcuts, muted Zoom calls running simultaneously. According to the story, all three companies considered her one of their top employees before discovering the truth and firing her on the same day.

It was fascinating.

It was believable.

And apparently, it was completely fake.

Still, the story sent me down a rabbit hole about “overemployment”: the very real, but statistically quite small, phenomenon of people secretly working multiple remote jobs simultaneously.

And the deeper I looked, the more interesting the reaction became.

Because while the actual number of people doing this appears relatively tiny, the fear surrounding it inside organizations feels enormous.

Some analysts even suggest that this anxiety quietly contributed to the push for return-to-office mandates. Not necessarily because productivity collapsed, but because visibility did.

For decades, companies relied on a simple psychological equation:If I can see you, I can trust you are working.

But remote work disrupted that logic.

Because knowledge work no longer behaves like factory work. Someone can appear permanently available while contributing very little. Another person can disappear for three quiet hours and produce extraordinary work.

And that uncertainty can feel deeply uncomfortable for leaders. Especially in organizations where contribution is still measured more through presence than outcomes.

The real tension underneath the “multiple jobs” panic may not be productivity at all. It may be trust.

Not trust in whether people are technically online, but trust in whether adults can manage autonomy responsibly when nobody is watching.

When organizations lose confidence in how value is created, they often retreat toward visibility: office mandates, surveillance software, activity tracking, endless status meetings. Yet ironically, these systems can slowly erode the very things modern organizations need most: ownership, initiative, and intrinsic motivation.

Perhaps the invisible employee is becoming a modern corporate myth. Not because nobody does it, but because the fear itself reveals something bigger: many organizations still struggle to measure contribution without measuring presence.

Where could Innate Motion help?

As work becomes increasingly flexible, distributed, and AI-augmented, organizations cannot rely solely on visibility as a proxy for value anymore. At Innate Motion, we help companies navigate these shifts by rebuilding cultures around trust, meaning, and human contribution rather than control alone. Through organizational transformation, leadership alignment, and human-centered culture design, we help teams move from monitoring activity toward creating environments where people genuinely want to contribute, grow, and take ownership.

P.S. Want your business to feel more human and make a bigger impact? Let’s fix that! Book a free 30-minute consultation and let’s tackle your biggest or smallest business challenge together.

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