As offices try to get back to the pre-COVID mode of functioning, a word that keeps cropping up is “moonlighting”.

When a person works on a side project of his own or for an employer other than his regular one, he is “moonlighting”. Before the COVID19 pandemic made work from home normal, companies did not allow employees to moonlight, especially where there was a conflict of interest.

Today, employees moonlight to make money, learn some skills or try out a new work profile without giving up their regular job. Employers, fighting the business slump, have cut back on training budgets and this could be pushing employees to learn new skills on the side.

Unless there are processes in place, a big loophole in WFH is that the employer cannot monitor the employee in his home during work hours, especially when not enough work is given to keep the employee busy.

Ethics aside, if the terms of employment restrict moonlighting, I feel it should be avoided. As an organization, we need to understand that a worker’s performance in the primary job could suffer if moonlighting has left him tired. There are also concerns about misuse of company resources, data leakage and abuse of intellectual property. An employee striving to meet targets in his moonlighting job could skip his primary employer’s work.

As with every new phenomenon, moonlighting has its pros and cons, and we need to have well-thought-out processes to handle it.

Before the COVID19 pandemic, hardly any business outside the information technology sector had laid down processes for WFH. But now, almost all companies have introduced WFH wherever possible.

It is too early to accept or rule out moonlighting. But we must accept that it has its impact much beyond just being a simple secondary source of income.