You recruit someone because your business needs help, spend money getting them through the door and invest your team’s time in showing them the ropes. Within a few days or weeks, you’re wondering whether they ever intended to do the bloody job.
I’m seeing a pattern in businesses that mostly operate remotely, and the similarities are becoming hard to ignore. A new employee starts, does a little work and then a crisis happens, followed by another explanation and another reason why they’re unavailable.
They’re ill, their child is ill, a relative is ill or someone has died. What initially sounded like a short absence becomes weeks, or you get a rolling succession of emergencies alongside lateness, missed meetings and days when they simply fail to turn up.
Others appear to be working, but nobody can contact them for hours. There’s a message here and there, perhaps a green status on Teams, yet the actual work barely moves and your team spends more time chasing them than collaborating with them.
Then the communication gets awkward, with calls declined and everything pushed into email or messages. Replies read as though your questions have been dropped into ChatGPT to produce something sufficiently formal to keep you at arm’s length, whilst the questions you actually need answered remain unresolved.
Meanwhile, you’re trying to be a decent employer and give them the benefit of the doubt. That willingness to be understanding gives someone who is deliberately stringing you along plenty of room to keep doing it.
Then I discovered there was a name for it
I started researching whether other people were describing similar experiences and found discussions about “churn and burn” within overemployment communities. Overemployment, or OE, involves holding multiple jobs during overlapping working hours, often remotely and without the employers knowing.
People openly discuss taking jobs, doing very little, collecting pay until they’re dismissed and then replacing those jobs to repeat the process. There are accounts of accepting a role for a few pay packets with little intention of making it work, alongside managers describing new hires disappearing for hours and producing almost nothing.
One discussion even brings together a new employee’s prolonged unavailability and comments about family explanations and hints at disability. Reading it was an uncomfortable moment of recognition, because those are precisely the sorts of situations leaving my clients wondering what the hell is going on.
Those discussions don’t prove what every individual employee is doing, but they reveal that deliberately stretching out a job for the income is a tactic people talk about. Business owners deserve to know that this possibility exists when a new starter’s explanations keep multiplying whilst their contribution remains negligible.
The incentive is to keep your money coming
From a human behaviour perspective, the incentive is obvious: every extra pay packet makes the arrangement worthwhile. Someone with another job may already have their main income covered, so whatever they can extract from your business becomes a bonus.
Someone else might have oversold their experience, taken a job they can’t manage or decided they can bluff their way through until you catch on. Whatever the starting point, another explanation can buy more time when the employer keeps postponing a decision.
Remote working creates space for that performance when apparent activity gets mistaken for actual contribution. A few messages and a plausible explanation for missing a call can keep the appearance of working going, whilst the people paying the salary struggle to establish how the day was spent.
There’s a very human calculation underneath it about how much someone can get away with and how long the employer will keep believing them. If every crisis gets another extension and every unanswered question eventually gets dropped, the person learns that the approach is working.
The employer’s reluctance to seem unreasonable becomes part of the opportunity. Someone acting deliberately can keep pushing because the inconvenience, cost and unfinished work all land on somebody else.
UK legislation makes this fertile ground
My frustration is that UK employment legislation, combined with the cost and uncertainty of disputes, creates leverage that someone acting in bad faith can exploit. The small business owner carries the practical risk of getting a decision wrong, even when the behaviour they’re trying to address is staring them in the face.
In some of the situations I’m seeing, disability or poor mental health comes into the conversation as the employer starts asking harder questions. Given the surrounding behaviour, I’m concerned that those disclosures are sometimes being used to frighten the employer into backing off, delaying action or tolerating a situation that is damaging the business.
The more cynical calculation is that an owner may eventually pay someone to leave because defending a tribunal claim feels too expensive and disruptive. Keep the employer anxious about legal consequences and suddenly paying for an exit starts looking like the least painful option.
I can’t prove someone’s motive from the timing alone, but I can see the effect on the owner. They start second guessing reasonable questions, worrying about every email and wondering whether it’s safer to keep paying someone who barely contributes than deal with the fallout of dismissing them.
Discrimination claims have no qualifying service requirement, so even a very short period of employment can carry legal exposure. Mentioning a condition doesn’t automatically establish a valid claim, but the fear of having to defend one can influence an employer’s decision before anyone has properly assessed the facts.
I have ADHD myself, and I’m thoroughly pissed off by the possibility of people exploiting protections others genuinely need. Disability and personal responsibility can coexist, whilst appropriate support and reasonable adjustments give an employer a route to understand what someone can do and make decisions about their employment.
In my view, a system that makes paying someone to disappear feel more affordable than properly challenging their behaviour creates a rotten incentive. Small businesses end up funding the gap between what is legally possible and what they can realistically afford to fight.
Your business and your team pick up the bill
The salary is only the beginning, because you’ve also paid for recruitment, equipment, licences and onboarding. Your existing employees have invested time in getting this person started, then find themselves doing the work the new hire was supposed to take off their hands.
Customers still expect a response, deadlines still exist and you still have to deliver. That usually means longer days, disrupted plans and capable people carrying an extra workload whilst somebody else offers another explanation.
Resentment builds when reliable employees keep covering the gaps and watching the same person receive another chance. Your attention gets pulled away from customers, growth and the people who are actually earning their salary, because you’re spending an absurd amount of time managing someone who has barely started.
Then there’s the replacement cost once it finally ends, followed by the anxiety about whether the next recruit will do the same thing. A business that offered flexibility in good faith can become suspicious and restrictive because someone took advantage of it.
For a small employer, that damage is personal as well as financial. It lands on the person who built the business and the team keeping it running, which is why I have very little patience for treating deliberate exploitation as some clever career hack.
What should make you look more closely
The pattern matters, especially when it starts almost immediately after someone joins. One difficult week tells you very little, but repeated problems combined with minimal output and evasive responses deserve proper scrutiny.
Look more closely when several of these appear together:
- Barely any completed work despite clear expectations and adequate onboarding
- Repeated lateness, missed meetings or failure to turn up
- Hours of unexplained unavailability during agreed working time
- Messages suggesting progress that never turns into usable output
- A succession of crises whenever attendance or delivery is challenged
- Explanations that change or conflict with earlier accounts
- Specific questions repeatedly sidestepped in long, formal replies
- Agreed contact declined without helping establish a workable alternative
- Health disclosures or legal threats arriving alongside continuing avoidance of the process
- Little interest in resolving the problem, accepting support or agreeing a realistic way forward.
The evidence you need is in the attendance, output, inconsistencies and engagement with reasonable expectations. Look at what is happening across the whole situation, because a diagnosis or preference for email alone won’t establish that someone is exploiting you.
Make your business harder to exploit
Start with recruitment that tests whether someone can actually do the job, using proportionate practical assessments and appropriate identity, right to work and reference checks. Explore material inconsistencies and make the role’s working hours, availability and communication requirements clear before they join.
For remote roles, define what the employee should deliver in their first week and first month, then provide the training and access they need. Regular reviews should make progress visible, so an occasional reassuring message has to be backed up by actual work.
Your contracts and policies need to cover absence reporting, keeping in touch, other employment, confidentiality and conflicts of interest. Health enquiries during recruitment have legal restrictions, so use appropriate checks and questions about the role rather than trying to screen out anyone who might need support.
Manage probation actively and address concerns as they arise, with decisions planned around the current legal position and contractual terms. Waiting until the end of probation to acknowledge a problem that was obvious in week two gives it far too much room to grow.
Managers also need to know how to respond when a crisis is reported, including what to record, which leave rules apply and when to involve HR. An owner making it up as they go along is far easier to unsettle with a formal sounding email!
If you think you are being strung along
Get the facts into a chronology, including attendance, contact attempts, explanations, completed work and support offered. Turn the feeling that someone is taking the piss into a clear account of what has happened and how it is affecting the business.
Establish what each absence relates to, because the employee’s own sickness, a dependant’s emergency and bereavement can involve different rights and pay arrangements. Follow the relevant reporting requirements, including fit notes for sickness lasting more than seven calendar days, and agree reasonable contact around the person’s circumstances.
If health is relevant, establish what support or adjustments are needed and consider occupational health advice with the necessary consent. Where calls are genuinely difficult, agree a workable alternative that still lets you obtain the information needed to manage the situation.
Put the specific concerns to the employee and give them an opportunity to respond, then choose the appropriate process. Capability, conduct, unauthorised absence and suspected dishonesty need different handling, so take advice before deciding how to proceed.
You can manage an employee who has a disability, and dismissal can still be lawful in appropriate circumstances after proper consideration of the facts, support, adjustments and applicable rights. The reason, evidence, process and notice all matter, which is why commercially focused advice is useful before you get pushed into a corner.
If a settlement is the sensible commercial option, make that decision based on the actual risk and cost, with a properly drafted agreement and the required independent advice for the employee. A threatening email deserves assessment rather than an automatic payment, and the limits of confidentiality need checking before settlement discussions begin.
Stop letting another month disappear
Small business owners already carry enough pressure without becoming an income stream for someone who has little intention of doing the work. When the pattern is there, you need confidence, evidence and a clear route to a decision before another month disappears into chasing messages and covering the vacancy.
If this feels familiar, bring in commercially focused HR support whilst you still have options. At Dynamic HR Services, I help owners deal with the immediate employee issue and tighten up the recruitment, management and culture gaps that allowed it to drag on, so the business and the people doing the work get the protection they deserve.
For me, burn and churn describes the way a business can be used up and discarded whilst the person doing it moves on to their next pay packet. The employer is left with the bill, the unfinished work and a team who are exhausted from covering the gaps, then has to recruit all over again.
That’s why this deserves to be called out as a scam when someone deliberately takes a job with little intention of doing the work and strings the employer along to keep the money coming. Hardworking business owners deserve to protect what they’ve built, and the cost of challenging exploitation should never make funding it feel like the safer option.