BENGALURU: Moonlighting, quiet quitting, productive paranoia... these terms have been doing the rounds in recent times, especially after a recent controversy when IT company Wipro fired 300 employees for moonlighting. Experts weigh in.
After the information technology (IT) company Wipro fired 300 employees for moonlighting, a can of worms has been opened surrounding ethical behaviour in the corporate world. Moonlighting essentially means working another job aside from your primary occupation. In many cases of this act, the employee keeps the knowledge of the second job hidden from his parent company. Wipro chief Rishad Premji has also come under vitriol after he remarked moonlighting is cheating.
“There might be two or three reasons why an employee might be moonlighting. By moonlighting here, I mean someone doing a part-time gig on the side, in a field different from their current job. But back to what I was saying, there are frankly two reasons behind someone’s choice to moonlight. One is to have a supplement in their income as they may not be paid sufficiently in their primary job. Two, their primary job may not be very exciting and they want to do something more fulfilling or satisfying for them,” says TN Hari, co-founder of the Artha School of Entrepreneurship.
T V Mohandas Pai, current chairman of Manipal Global Education who was the former director of Infosys, feels the act of moonlighting can be considered cheating depending on the employment contract. “If the company contract prohibits an employee from having a second job, then the latter has to adhere to it. If the contract allows it, then the employee can work another job, but they have to do it in their own time and not use any of the company resources,” says Pai.
However, not every company looks at moonlighting as strictly as Wipro does. Anand K, who works in Bengaluru as a cloud consultant for a startup, believes the work culture there is not very stringent. “I have been working on another venture, which is a passion project, for the past six months. I started this to influence more people into thinking about sales as a profession. My CEO has been very supportive of it and has helped me out with many difficulties I faced in the beginning,” says Anand. Regarding the ethics of it all, Anand mentions that all is fine as long as basic business ethics are maintained. “Bengaluru is a powerhouse of talent.
The productivity of our talent will directly influence our economy. That said, I believe we should also be mindful of conflicts of interest, basic business ethics,” adds Anand. Ritesh Roy, who works in the city as an account coordinator at a US-based multimedia MNC, feels his company permits working another job as long as it’s in a different field. “We are not allowed to work full-time or part-time anywhere, as the kind of business my company deals with is quite sensitive and confidential. We aren’t even allowed to post anything about our projects or clients on social media. If we ever want to share something, we have to get approval from our HR team.
Though I have known some of my colleagues volunteering and running businesses, and some even do freelance projects, nothing is related to the work we do at our organisation,” shares Roy. Pai reiterates that not being allowed to work a second job with a competing company is the ethical norm. “Usually, your second job, if it is allowed, can not be with a competitor. If it’s any other field, it can work. Regarding the controversy surrounding Wipro, I believe what they did was right,” says Pai.