#HowTo | How to prepare for a flexible, gig-oriented, self-aware workforce that thrives on moonlighting

(Illustration by Suneesh K)

Note to Readers: HowTo is a series designed to give our readers an edge on matters of competitiveness, upskilling/reskilling and knowledge gathering. Essayed in a lucid, snackable format, the series acts as a tutorial that brings in the most relevant voices on a subject, so that you benefit the most in your business or career. In this feature, we take a deep dive into what the Future of Work has in store for us.

With Union Minister for Skill Development Rajeev Chandrasekhar making it clear that moonlighting is here to stay after software titans Wipro and Infosys clamped down on it, a new debate on the Future of Work has opened up. With the pandemic waning, a whole new generation of workers are looking to see how they can fit work into their lives rather than the other way around.

How to work, when to work and where to work have become key points of discussion this year globally, especially in technology driven sectors. Previous generations may have seen work as a 9-5 activity, but the current generation is looking at greater flexibility and purpose. Future generations are likely to push this trend further forward and it’s probably time we reimagined work as a concept.

In the UK, a nation-wide four-day work week trial is going on smoothly and most companies have said that they are likely to continue with the new pattern. In fact, many of those companies participating in the trial have reported higher productivity, despite employees working one day less.

Let’s examine this phenomenon of Work Reimagined in finer detail.

The Employee Pushback

Earlier this year, many CEOs of global companies wanted their employees to report back to office as they felt the pandemic wasn’t a threat any longer. But they received a huge push back from a significant segment of the workforce who felt at home with their work from home (WFH) schedules. While workers at AT&T demanded that WFH be made a permanent option, a group of employees at Apple said they were able to do high quality work remotely. They just loved the flexibility that ‘work from anywhere’ brought to their lives.

Then came the huge debate around mental health. Post-pandemic, employees had huge concerns around their mental health and they wanted to have options around work patterns. Some said they were willing to adopt a hybrid model but didn’t want organisations to dictate the mode of work. This year also saw the Great Resignation wave with employees quitting in large numbers in sectors like hospitality, healthcare and transportation. Great resignation was more evident in lowly paid jobs, with many employees opting to take a break and wait to find better working terms and conditions.

The Era of Skillsets and Packets of Work

A World Economic Forum report that came out a while ago had said that while automation will create more jobs than it will displace, it’s advisable to keep an innovative mindset at work backed by creative skills. Creativity and social intelligence are not something that digital technologies can easily replace, the report noted.

Highly specialised workers are now looking to take their skillsets everywhere and not get attached to any one company. Rohit Chennamaneni, cofounder of start-up unicorn Darwinbox, believes the future belongs to “packets of work”. More companies will look to employ skills of workers as and when required and compensate them according to their productivity and quality of delivery.

“Skill based working will be the work model in future and there will be no global boundaries. Companies will look for specific skills and talent the world over – be it Ukraine, Kazakhstan, India or wherever – and utilise that to their benefit,” says Chennamaneni. “The free markets will take over based on demand and supply of talent who prefer one kind of work vs the other. If there are too many regulations in a work contract, it will be difficult to attract a certain talent. There is plenty of moonlighting happening in the creative spaces and this is likely to spread to technology areas too.”

Already food delivery platform Swiggy has introduced a policy of moonlighting in which employees are allowed to take up additional jobs subject to certain conditions.

Gig working, which has been in vogue in several industries for years, will grow into larger organised sectors in a big way. Says Jessie Paul, founder of Paul Writer, a marketing advisory, “Huge projects will be broken down into smaller modules. Employees must invest in their skills and their brand if they have to win solo projects. In a gig economy, companies are not going to care about how you are building your skills. That will be up to you.”

Free expression of talent

In future, it may be difficult to pin down talent to their key result areas (KRA) alone. Workers are likely to go beyond and experiment. That’s where the concept of intrapreneurship gets a pat on the back.

Globally, many companies encourage this. They find it worthwhile to allow employees work on a project of their interest. This keeps the worker gainfully employed, while also helping her to appreciate the company better. As long as this doesn’t interfere with the company’s objectives or goals, the management is unlikely to bother much. This can also reduce the temptation of moonlighting for other companies to a great extent.

Ashish Kumar Singh, CHRO of ecommerce unicorn Meesho, says today’s workforce can be split largely into two categories. “At one end there is the super-skilled category who are very much in demand. They are the ones who specialise in cutting edge skills, which are rarely found in the market. This is the category that makes it a talent driven market. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the easily available talent, which is more of a labour driven market,” Singh says.

In the skilled category, companies are willing to be more flexible in order to attract special talent. “If you want me to work exclusively for you, then please pay me to be exclusive,” says Jessie Paul, who was earlier the chief marketing officer at Wipro.

Keeping employees in a cocoon and discouraging free expression of their talents may not work from now on. Union minister Chandrasekhar himself has gone on record to state that there has been a structural shift in the minds and attitudes of the young Indian tech workforce. He was categorical in stating that companies who pinned their employees down were found to fail.

A flexible future

As work becomes more flexible and moonlighting becomes commonplace, workers will be forced to polish their negotiating powers and communication skills.

Says Manish Sabharwal, vice-chairman of Teamlease, “Young people must think of themselves as a portfolio of skills, relationship, roles and experiences. This portfolio must be constantly mined, gardened and renewed.”

He believes that the workplace will see more diversity as companies form concentric circles of 8-9 kinds of contracts based on hours, location and flexibility. “The core will be full-time workers who work from office. Employees will pick what they want based on the stage of life, commute, compensation etc. I think it’s bad advice to young people that there are no trade-offs between the various options.”

While COVID has proven that remote working is possible, it has also demonstrated the limitations of this model. As a net result, there may not be a great increase in the population working from home but it will greatly increase the number of employees who factor in some flexibility into their work schedule, he says. The more influential you are in the industry, the more flexibility you may be accorded by the employer.

The third edition of McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey released this year stated that 87 percent of the people took the chance to work flexibly, when offered. The survey said that 77 percent of the people working in the computer and mathematical occupations were willing to work fully remotely. The McKinsey report said employers should realise that when a candidate is deciding between job offers with similar compensation, the opportunity to work flexibly can become the deciding factor.

Productivity Focus

In future, there is bound to be greater focus on productivity. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has coined a term called “productivity paranoia” wherein leaders think their employees are not productive and employees feel they are burnt out. One of the most important things in this new world of work is to bridge this paradox, Nadella said in a television interview.

Then there is the time vs productivity paradigm. Just because someone clocks 20 hours of work and another person clocks 10 hours, that doesn’t mean the latter did less. “It’s the outcome that matters,” says Ashwin Damera, co-founder of edtech unicorn Eruditus. “It doesn’t matter how many hours you clocked or whether you worked on weekends or not. What counts are the results,” he says. Eruditus, in fact, offers a course on the future of work in association with Wharton. “If you continue to clock-in and clock-out people, you won’t be hiring too many good employees in the future.”

Former HR head of Infosys and start-up investor TV Mohandas Pai says employers will eliminate the marginal contributors. The focus will be on highly productive employees who constantly upskill themselves. Jobs contracts will be redesigned to tackle issues such as moonlighting, he says, adding that the country may not need a law on this if there are proper contracts.

Employees are seeking more freedom and flexibility and gig platforms are willing to protect their identities. Hence, employers will look to get more work out of the workers, who in turn will seek more flexibility. Job contracts will include disclosure norms that prevent employees from working with direct competitors. But people are finding ways to work anonymously for other brands. “The full impact of all this will be seen by year 2025, three years from now,” says Pai.