Why Employees Indulge in Moonlighting and How to Prevent It?

Unmonitored work from home may prompt employees to indulge in moonlighting, though you cannot prevent them from working after office hours. However, Mohandas Pai, former director of Infosys, believes that the low entry-level salaries in the tech industry is a significant cause to moonlighting. In addition, when everything went digital due to the pandemic, people were forced to work from home, giving them an opportunity to moonlight. The surge in gig opportunities made it easier for even highly paid IT employees to make a fast buck from side hustles. Employees resort to moonlighting thinking they are not being monitored. The good news is that you can use a project time tracking software to keep track of the time they report for work, which can be monitored using such special software tools.

What’s disheartening to employers is that moonlighting is made easy with technology that lets moonlighters work with companies located thousands of miles away. Popular gig platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, appen, and Proposa post thousands of attractive gigs for freelancers, which full-time employees don’t mind responding to.

The issue is so vexing and is in the news frequently, with industry watchers looking out for effective ways to prevent moonlighting and curb this menace that is eating into productivity and profits.

Infosys sent out emails to its employees cautioning them that they cannot hold dual employment. If a cautionary email won’t influence employees, employers can quote the law of the land, which regulates (according to the Shops and Establishments Act) the hours of work, working conditions (exceptionally good in smart/green buildings), besides terms of services, leaves, and holidays. More importantly, the Act says (in some states) an employee is forbidden from working with another organization on a holiday, which is more from a human rights angle, supporting the need for employees to rest and recuperate.

However, what about employees working for another company during working hours?

It makes sense for employers to include a clause in the employment contract restricting dual employment, and companies that haven’t included such a clause in their contracts would do well to do so immediately, considering the growing menace that moonlighting has become today.

However, such mild methods are seldom effective. So, what’s the moonlighting solution? The best way to prevent moonlighting is to use an activity tracker, which can be easily installed on the computers. Moreover, the versatile software can be linked to timesheets to automatically detect deviations that enable managers to validate work. Project time tracking software is the best way to make your employees desist from taking up an additional job. You can monitor them to significantly reduce the moonlighting problem. Productivity issues arising due to moonlighting can be promptly identified and employees counseled accordingly. It is the best moonlighting solution to keep track of holders of middle-level desk jobs, and software development teams who work on their systems most of the time. The software helps reduce the moonlighting problem by not only discouraging your employees from working for two companies but also helps them organize themselves better and become more efficient and productive. Some employees may have the audacity to indulge in a side hustle even when they are not working from home but working from their offices. Hence, regardless of whether your employees work remotely or not, the software shows you how to find out if an employee is moonlighting. And what’s more is, it is easy and safe to install activity trackers on all computers.

Just as employees expect fairness and transparency from their employers, they, on the other hand, have a right to expect integrity, unwavering loyalty, and maintaining ethics while working for an organization. Most employers prefer a hybrid system of working, with a few days of working at the workplace and a few days working from home. However, although employees are reluctant to return to their workplaces, the day is not far away when everything gets back to normal, and workplaces get noisy with the excitement and chatter of eager employees exchanging notes.

eFACiLiTY^® has a set of apt tools using which you can track project-wise timesheets integrated with activity tracking. It enables managers to tally the timesheets against the actual worked hours before approving. Moreover, randomly captured time-stamped screenshots allow managers to verify the actual work performed, helping prevent moonlighting to a great extent. The tools also provide data to the payroll, based on which the salaries can be processed, and this can limit moonlighting to a great extent.