What Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji called "cheating - plain and simple" may now be getting some room in the IT services industry, according to an ET report. Major player Infosys has come up with a policy to allow its employees to take up external "gig work", provided they inform the company and don't trigger a conflict of interest.
Moonlighting rocked the IT services industry last month when Wipro took a tough stance and let hundreds of employees go for taking up work outside of their employment with the company. Now, it appears as if things have changed.
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said that some staff were sacked for taking up full-time employment outside their current jobs. However, they are forming new policies, expected to be announced in a few days, which will be tolerant of part-time projects with other companies.
A start-up like Swiggy allows moonlighting because the chances of a conflict of interest (working for Zomato or another competitor) are relatively low. The same is not the case with IT companies as they have hundreds of employees, have projects billed to a diversified list of clients and have strict legal documents about confidentiality and loyalty.
A challenge for the IT industry is a case where an Infosys employee might be working on a JP Morgan project while simultaneously work on a Bank of America project. So, why is Infosys taking this stance on part-time work? "Because learning is core to the company, we are happy to allow people to explore these external gigs," Infosys HR head Krish Shankar told ET. "But there are certain caveats and we are putting a process in place."
"It has to be done in a transparent way, with the manager involved in it," he said. "It cannot be in conflict with the company or its clients, therefore, it cannot be a competitor or a competitor to our clients. Nor should it be in areas where they use proprietary technology that we use for our clients. But if you do open-source coding for something, that's fine."
The company said it hoped that employees would limit these part-time projects to the weekend but it was not something that could be assured. The IT major, however, said it hoped to keep the policy simple and easy to follow.
This appears to be a way for the company to retain talent when the IT industry is seeing sky-high attrition rates. Retention happens to be the central agenda for all IT players today. This is why companies have kept their return-to-work policies flexible as that is what employees are demanding right now.