Commenting on people taking up side projects alongside their regular jobs, Wipro executive chairman Rishad Premji on Saturday tweeted that employees who moonlight in the tech industry were ‘cheating’.
The reference might have been to foodtech startup Swiggy allowing its employees to take on other jobs in their free time for an “economic consideration”.
Subject to internal approvals, staff at the SoftBank-backed company could take up work outside of office hours or on weekends, but have to ensure that their projects do not conflict with Swiggy’s business. Experts had said unless the company is able to prove that a certain number of employees earned a particular amount, it’s going to look like a public relation stunt and a talent retention attempt.
“There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating — plain and simple,” Rishad Premji tweeted on Saturday afternoon.
Incidentally, Wipro has held back variable pay of employees, above a certain threshold, mainly due to pressure on margins, inefficiency in its talent supply chain and its investment in technology.
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The move could spell trouble for the IT giant as it runs the risk of increased employee attrition. During the April-June quarter, attrition at Wipro was at 23.3% — the second highest level after 23.8% registered in the March 2022 quarter.
Interestingly, moonlighting is not new. A recent Kotak Institutional Equities (KIE) survey of 400 people across the IT&ITES space, revealed that a staggering 65% knew of people pursuing part-time opportunities or moonlighting while working from home. Moreover, HR experts have attributed moonlighting as one of the factors that makes many staffers reluctant to come back to office. Further, the poll also found that less than 1% of the respondents are in favour of a five–day week. In fact, 42% of the participants said they would consider changing their jobs or even quitting if they were not allowed to work from home.
A recent Willis Towers Watson ‘Reimagining Work and Rewards Survey’ revealed that in the past two years, the number of organisations in the country that are finding it hard to attract and retain talent has increased sharply. For a high 78%, attracting talent is a tough task, while 64% of the companies are finding it challenging to retain employees. The survey concluded that talent challenges are expected to persist across all employee categories in 2022.