Food delivery platform Swiggy on Wednesday said it has introduced an industry-first ‘Moonlighting policy’ for its employees, under which its employees can take up external projects for pro-bono or economic consideration based on internal approvals. This could encompass activity outside of office hours or on weekends that does not impact their productivity on the full-time job or have a conflict of interest with Swiggy’s business in any way.
“During the countywide lockdowns, a significant portion of the working population discovered new hobbies and perhaps even an activity that provides an additional source of income. Be it volunteering with an NGO, working as a dance instructor, or content creation for social media, Swiggy firmly believes that working on such projects outside of one’s full-time employment can significantly contribute to both professional and personal development of an individual,” the company said.
Commenting on the new policy, Girish Menon, head (human resources) at Swiggy, said: “Swiggy has always strived to understand the diverse aspirations of its employees and to design its organisational policies to suit their evolving needs. With the Moonlighting Policy, our goal is to encourage employees to pursue their passion without any constraints due to their full-time employment with us. This is yet another step in our journey towards building a world class ‘people-first’ organisation.”
The company said the policy prescribes guidelines that employees must adhere to while pursuing moonlighting projects. Projects that pose a higher risk of conflict of interest or interference with the employees’ duties to Swiggy are subject to an approval process. The policy is available to all full-time employees of Bundl Technologies, including subsidiaries, affiliates, associate, and group companies.
Yamini Koganti, assistance vice-president (HRBP), said, “Swiggy has always strived to create employee-first benefits. Over the last two years, we observed that some of our employees were getting opportunities to render gig services, leveraging their professional skills outside work.”
She added that some even discovered new hobbies during the lockdown and have been keen to pursue them now because they find time due to remote-first ways of working. To solve this need of employees we came up with an industry-first Moonlighting policy.
“Swiggy trusts that its employees can excel in their performance, while picking up interesting projects outside work. Which is why the team came up with the policy,” the company said in a blogpost.
It added that to be employee-centric, the team also wanted to design the policy mechanisms in a way that makes it simpler for an employee to undertake these gigs. “With that in mind, the projects have been divided into two buckets A & B. List A projects are high-sensitive, leveraging professional know-how. List B are projects that fall under the space of interests and hobbies, that are non-professional in nature,” she said.
Last week, Swiggy announced its permanent work-from-anywhere policy for a majority of its roles. The decision was arrived at based on team needs and feedback from several managers and employees who vouched for the flexibility and increased productivity working from home has given them in the last two years.
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