The phantom shift. Your full-time hire has three other full-time jobs.
An "engineer" you pay for 40 focused hours is simultaneously logged into three other employers under the same name. In surveys of remote workers, 37% admit to holding a second full-time job; some tech workers juggle five and clear $725K — all inside one 40-hour week. McKinsey puts the cost of remote time misrepresentation at roughly $50,000 a year per affected worker. Manav flags the same human signed into two payrolls at once.
"Active" in your tools doesn't mean a human is working. It often means a human is working somewhere else.
Status lights stay green, the mouse jiggles, standups get a canned update — while the actual person is in another company's sprint. Microsoft found that 31% of reported productivity was "digital theater": looking busy, producing little. The overemployed worker isn't lazy; they're double- and triple-booked, and your project is the one quietly getting the leftovers.
Every manager has suspected it. Almost none can prove it.
The reason overemployment thrives is that presence is faked at the tool layer — VPN sessions, calendar holds, idle-prevention scripts — none of which prove a specific human is actually here, on this work, now. Without a human-bound presence signal, you cannot distinguish a focused employee from a logged-in placeholder, and you certainly cannot see that the same person is concurrently live in a competitor's environment.
Is a human actually on your work right now?
It's 2:30pm, inside a billable focus block for identity mnav_8e2…. The Slack dot is green. Check presence the old way, then the Manav way.
What you're seeing: a green dot proves a session is open. A Manav presence proof is bound to the human — so it can see the same person live in three other companies at the same moment.
Bind presence to a human, not a session. Detect concurrency and impossible travel.
// Lightweight human-presence proof during focused / billable work const p = await manav.presence({ manav_id: worker.manavId, context: "focus_block" }); // Manav already knows this manav_id's live sessions across tenants if (p.concurrent_sessions > 1) flag("active_at_another_employer"); if (p.impossible_travel) flag("two_cities_same_hour"); if (p.human_score < 50) flag("idle_or_automated_placeholder");
Presence is anchored to the worker's own device passkey, so it can't be handed to an idle-jiggler or a script. Because the signal is the human — not the laptop or the VPN — Manav can see when one identity is live in two tenants at the same moment, or "travels" between two cities in an hour. This isn't surveillance of what someone types; it's a proof that one human is genuinely present on the work you're paying for, and not three places at once.
What the phantom shift costs you.
Apply McKinsey's $50K-per-affected-worker figure across the share of your remote workforce realistically double-booked. Recovered hours and avoided mis-pay flow straight back.
Where this lives.
Concurrency alerts
Managers see one signal — "this identity was live elsewhere during your focus blocks" — instead of guessing from a green dot.
Billable-hour proof
Hours billed are backed by human-presence proofs, so you pay for time a real person actually spent on your work.
Presence, not surveillance
Manav stores a presence score and session metadata — never keystrokes, screen content, or webcam feeds. Privacy is the product.
Pay for presence you can prove.
→ See also: the rotating contractor · the sleeper on the payroll