An Indian multinational information technology company, Infosys has fired a few employees in recent months for moonlighting. However, the exact numbers are not mentioned.
CEO Salil Parekh said, “If we have found employees doing work in two different companies, where there are confidentiality issues, we have let them go in the last 12 months.”
However, Parekh also said that Infosys is looking at developing comprehensive policies to support employees to take up external gig opportunities. “For gig opportunities in the external environment, we support the aspirations of our employees to learn beyond work.”
“We will support them to work on certain gig projects after the prior approval of the managers. We are also developing more comprehensive policies for that while also ensuring contractual and confidentiality commitments are fully respected. However, to be clear, we do not support dual employment.” He added.
Parikh further said,” Infosys’s internal platform called ‘Accelerate’ has anyway been enabling employees to take up internal projects and gig for several years now. “We’ve always encouraged our employees to have that mindset within the company,” he said, adding that about 4,000 employees apply for it in an average quarter, while 600 get selected.”
Earlier, Wipro laid off 300 employees who were found working with its competitor companies at the same time employment with Wipro.
Last month, Infosys said that moonlighting is not permitted according to the employees’ code of conduct of the company.
Infosys said that employees cannot take up other assignments during or outside business hours. Further, the company has also added that any violation will lead to disciplinary action that could include termination of employment.
The company describes it with the taglines ‘No two-timing, no moonlighting’ and ‘No double lives. Infosys has sent an internal communication email to employees.
Infosys clearly stated in the offer letter, “You agree not to take employment, whether full-time or part-time as director/ partner/ member/ employee of any other organization/ entity engaged in any form of business activity without the consent of Infosys.”
“The consent may be given subject to any terms and conditions that the company may think fit and may be withdrawn at any time at the discretion of the company,” the mail from the company said.
Infosys has introduced a program called Bridge an initiative designed to enable employees to shift careers into adjacent or new career tracks.
Bridge gives employees access to higher skill levels and different job streams, one-on-one interaction with leaders, and career counseling. The bridge program focuses is to a digital specialist, focused on building talent that will help Infosys be at the upstream of its digital transformation work with clients.
There are bridges to process and domain consulting, business consulting, infrastructure consulting, power programming (deep programming), and to deep architecture.
Infosys’ headcount as of September 30, 2022 is 3,45,218. Last quarter, Infosys had a net employee addition of 21,171 employees. The company’s attrition has reduced to 27.1 percent in Q2FY23 from 28.4 percent last quarter.
