HCL Technologies has restricted their employees from moonlighting adding fuel to an already burning fire in the Indian Tech Industry. The organization has claimed that the issue is not a major one within the company but they don’t approve of dual employment. Moonlighting or dual employment generally means when employees of an organization work on more than one job at a time, as a freelancer or as a part-time second employment.
"Dual employment while working for HCL Tech…we do not approve of that. Everybody who signs up to work for HCL Tech is signing up employment contract which requires exclusivity. The requirements around confidentiality, and non compete… all those provisions that are there we expect our employees to honour those commitments," Ramachandran Sundararajan, Chief People Officer of the company said in an interview.
The issue of moonlighting has been a severe one as companies are insisting on bringing back pre-Covid work ethic back to the office scene. Last month Wipro fired 300 of its employees for moonlighting for which the company’s CEO Thierry Delaporte said that “while little side jobs were fine, working for a competitor is a “question of ethics”. The chairman of Wipro, Rishad Premji also said that the employees were fired as the IT services company has no place for any employee who chooses to work directly with rivals while being on Wipro payrolls. The Wipro chief received a lot of flak for terming "moonlighting", which means taking up a second job or other assignments apart from one's full-time job as "cheating".
The company said whether it is pay raise in this cycle or controling variable pay even in hard times, the company has stayed on course and stuck to its policy. There aren’t any changes in the company’s approach to variable pay or, for that matter, annual income review. The only change in annual reimbursement review this year has been with regard to top leadership team where compensation has been deferred by a quarter. Fortunately, Sundararajan said, moonlighting has not come up as a big problem within HCL Technologies. “We don’t have that as big problem that we have too many people indulging in dual employment. It is not a big problem. We have had one or two stray instances,” he said.
After Wipro, many other IT companies like IBM and Infosys, have indicated that they will also take strict steps against employees for moonlighting.
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