The ongoing debate over moonlight focuses on serious shortcomings in people management – not in the sense of managers not being able to control the total loyalty of those working under their charge, but in setting the right expectations. In the sense of corporate inefficiency to their employees and then to measure the work done by those employees.
Rishad Premji of Wipro called Chandni a hoax. The TCS CEO called it a moral failure. These views are valid if, and only if, binding corporate policy prohibits an employee from working on the other side. Let’s say the policy explicitly allows employees to take jobs that neither take away from their deliverables at work nor conflict with their primary employer’s business—in that case, an ethical problem or fraud. Where is the question?
The word moonlight itself connotes secrecy and potential illegality. However, we acknowledge that employers are happy to ignore, if not encourage, some favors without calling them by that derogatory name or dubbing their performance as moonlight. Writing a book in your spare time is something most employers are prepared for their employees to endure. Managers who lecture at management schools or speak in industry are treated as brand ambassadors, not people who are wasting time paid for by the company—even when such a public Appearance management boosts sales tom, such corporate leaders can write on the side, even without the opprobrium.
If an employee chooses to paint, play a musical instrument, or play a weekend shutterbug, no employer would think of them as a fraud or a scoundrel, even if the painting, performance or photographs receive supplemental income to their creator. So why does taking another job get hacked in most human resources departments?
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An HR manager might say that when an employee writes a book or volunteers at a local gurudwara, he does so in his spare time. That is, his extracurricular activity does not take time, which he is paid to provide. Another difference, it shall be stated that such activity by an employee does not conflict with the company’s own business. So, the second principle is that there should be no conflict of interest in the supplementary work.
Provided these two conditions are also fulfilled in the case of another job, why should an employee have any objection to supplementing his income?
Apart from transparency, the main issue is manageability, setting goals for employees and measuring their work outputs. If an employee meets their goals and still does odd jobs, while a coworker does not, it will likely help the company identify potential and drive people who are currently unemployed and give them additional responsibility. Can be given, as well as, of course, additional income.
In fact, a policy of allowing employees to take on a second job can help companies identify not only the level of competence and initiative among their employees, but also roles that may not have been outsourced. As well as roles that may have job expectations, pre-determined and intense employee engagement can be overcome, in addition to measuring the given task against the target. Such roles can be opened up to gig workers. An employee who does multiple jobs is, in fact, a gig worker, with the difference that his retirement savings and health insurance come from a specialized job provider.
In other words, a culture of transparently allowing complementary work will help companies identify recruits whose careers need to be accelerated, sharpening job profiles, and in the case of some types of work, others. Worker cost sharing with companies will help. It would also improve managerial efficiency, and create a new culture of sharp focus on the ability of employees to identify and reward employees, which could, in theory, also reduce the rate of decline.
Swiggy, which started the debate over moonlighting by implementing a policy allowing employees to do supplementary work, was not reducing moonlighting any more when formulating its new policy.
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