Analysts have opined that the moonlighting issue will continue to haunt Indian IT industry. Even as majors TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Tech have cleared their stances on the moonlighting trend in the sector, analysts feel unless structural changes are implemented by the industry, it will continue.
Flexibility needed
IT majors have disapproved of the practice and some of them — Infosys, Wipro — have even fired employees for moonlighting. While companies and employees have been divided on the issue so far, analysts say that providing innovation in the nature of their work, flexibility may prevent moonlighting.
Aditya Mishra, CEO at CIEL HR Services said, “Employees are looking at different set of challenges, interesting assignments and some excitement which is remaining unfulfilled in one’s job. If the companies can offer the same to them, moonlighting can be prevented.” However, it wouldn’t be easy for highly structured IT companies to make dynamic changes, he added.
“Increased and continuous employee experiences and culture programmes could help leverage attachment and commitment from the employees,” Vijay Sivaram, CEO, Quess IT Staffing said. However, this measure wont necessarily be the only deterrent, he added.
Low pay
Employees have contended that the low salary is also one of the reasons for moonlighting. The fresher salaries, especially in the IT sector, have remained almost stagnant. The packages grew only 45 per cent from ₹2.45 lakh to ₹3.5 lakh in the last decade, according to reports.
Infosys’s CEO Salil Parekh in a recent press conference said that the company has sacked employees it found moonlighting. “If we have found in the past employees who are doing blatant work in two specific companies with this confidentiality issues, we have let them go.”
The company however has made an effort to encourage gig work internally. Parekh said, Infosys has a platform — Accelerate — through which employees can work on projects outside of their main lines of work. Around 4,000 employees apply and 600 get selected for the platform, he said.
Wipro’s Azim Premji too had earlier said that the company has fired 300 employees it found moonlighting. Its CEO Thierry Delaporte recently said, “Contracts have to respected. When people are going for another job that has conflict of interest with Wipro, we don’t accept that.”
Similarly, TCS has termed it as an ethical issue and said it is against the core values of the company. HCL Tech, although saying it is not a major concern for them, has disapproved of the practice.
