Food delivery startup Swiggy has introduced a new "moonlighting policy" which allows employees to pick up additional projects outside work.
Any project or activity that is taken up outside office hours or on the weekend, without affecting productivity, and does not have a conflict of interest, can be picked up by the employees, the startup says in a blog post.
"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 food ordering platform says.
With the latest policy, employees can now pick up projects beyond work that add to their professional and mental well-being, the company adds.
"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. 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," says Yamini Koganti, assistant vice president of Human Resource at Swiggy.
Koganti, who worked on this policy since its conception, says the company's goal is to enable employees to pursue their passions for economic interests alongside their full-time employment. This is yet another step towards building a remote-first organisation, she adds.
To be employee-centric, the company 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 says.
According to the policy, projects that are picked up for economic consideration or fall under List A will need to be declared. The employee can pursue these projects once they are approved by Swiggy.
"The employee will have to declare a few necessary details so that the team can greenlight the project," she says.
Currently, the HR team has 10 projects lined up for approval, with Goda Doreswamy, AVP Data Science, being one of the first to get her project approved.
"In my approved project, I will be working with a friend to enable a smart spaces platform based on IOT intelligence. This helps me get exposed to a totally different domain like IOT for smart spaces and I am able to expand my purview of AI applications across domains," Goda says.
