Coexisting with moonlighting

Let me start with the facts.

• About 10% of IT employees in India are moonlighting.
• Some of the corporates like Infosys do allow moonlighting with prior approval.
• COVID-19 has changed the landscape of work giving employees opportunities to freelance remotely.

Here’s why we should be looking at drafting policies that allow the corporates to coexist with moonlighting.

1. Corporations have to follow labor laws when it comes to setting the maximum number of hours any employee is supposed to work for their organization. If it exceeds 40 hours (in most cases), there’s a possibility of a lawsuit. If an employee wishes to pursue a passion, a paid gig, or anything they want to do during their personal time post their 8 hours of shift, they should be allowed to do so; provided they’re not sharing confidential or proprietary information with the other clients/customers or working with a competitor, etc.
2. With layoffs becoming a new normal in 2022, employees are seeking financial security to be prepared for a possible call that says - “Sorry, we have to let you go.” This also helps the corporates to unburden themselves during conversations when an employee asks for a raise not based upon the value they produce but based upon their financial conditions at home (which happens quite a lot and it puts the managers in a difficult spot).
3. The corporates get a pool of diverse service providers from within their employee base which makes talent search easier for different projects within the organization. It could be hiring a musician from the team for an upcoming corporate event or getting an employee involved in regarding initiatives at work.
4. It improves employee retention. A big chunk of the employees is leaving their organizations to become freelancers as it promises more income and exposure. If this becomes a new normal, we can expect a big percentage of the workforce to leave the organization due to the absence of coexistence policies. And it’s quite possible that the corporate will end up hiring freelancers in the future to do the same job that their teams (who have now reduced in size) used to do.
5. It also allows corporates to draft value-based KRAs for their employees that focus on the positive contributions each employee is expected to produce to ease the coexistence of moonlighting. Similar to any contractual position where a contractor has to submit the deliverables and raise an invoice for the same, a similar model can be developed within corporates where they assess the quality of deliverables that their employees produce within the permissible limit of hours they work to ensure their work is not impacted due to moonlighting.

I might have some blindspots that I would love for all the readers to enlighten me on.

However, as of today, I do think that moonlighting is the future of work and corporates need to figure out policies to coexist with it.