I spoke with Sharon Salim of The Straits Times for her piece on the post-pandemic rise in side hustles, published on Monday.¹

Say you want to start a side hustle. Maybe it's a long-time hobby that you've decided to start charging for.² Or maybe it's something for which you've studied the market for a while, and have identified a gap. Maybe you are, uh, sick and tired of your soul-crushing job and want to start some F&B franchise operation.³

But you're - understandably - reluctant to quit your day job. Maybe the side hustle will take a while to take off,⁴ but the bills will still keep coming regardless. Maybe you're not willing to give up the professional satisfaction and the potential for career advancement offered by your current employment. Maybe you just want to keep your options open.

So do you:
(a) schedule a meeting with your line manager, or even HR department, to inform them of your side hustle?
(b) keep quiet, balance both your day job and side hustle, and manage the side hustle in a subtle way in the hope that your employer doesn't find out about it?
(c) throw caution to the winds, openly flaunt to your employer the fact that you've got a side hustle, and maybe even treat the workplace as a market for your services and products?

Eh, I don't know. This isn't a purely legal question. It probably depends on your own personality, the culture of your workplace, the nature of your job, how understanding your direct colleagues are, and the list goes on.

And as I shared with Sharon:

'Mr Khelvin Xu, a disputes and employment lawyer and director at law firm Covenant Chambers, said it also boils down to the relationship between employees and their supervisors.

“If they (employees) are meeting or exceeding expectations, their employer is more likely to see what­ever they are doing in a positive light.

“Conversely, if they are not doing well, their employer may well latch onto their side hustle as a reason, and perhaps even use that as a pretext to push the employee towards the exit,” he said.

“As a very general rule of thumb, if your side hustle is completely unrelated to your day job, and you are still meeting or exceeding expectations for your day job, then chances are less that you are in breach of this duty of good faith and fidelity.”

Mr Xu added that if there are no clauses in an employment contract that expressly prohibit outside work, “the courts are generally reluctant to impose restrictions which would hamper employees from increasing their earnings in their spare time”.'

So, uh, keep hustling, y'all?⁵