Working On Your Own Terms

WORK FOR EIGHT MONTHS A YEAR OR 12 HOURS A WEEK, OR BE A PART-TIME CMO OR CFO — FLEXIBLE EMPLOYMENT MODELS ARE BECOMING EFFICIENT RETENTION TOOLS FOR INDIA INC.

- APRAJITA SHARMA

FIFTY-YEAR-OLD Puneet Khanna is a chief financial officer. Where, you ask! Khanna is not your regular CFO working full-time with a single firm. He is a ‘virtual CFO’ for six companies working specifically on “smart and well-defined” objectives. He also serves as a virtual CEO with France-based Edenred. He is earning three-four times higher than what he did before — his last ‘full-time’ stint was with Brightstar Telecommunications India Ltd (formerly Beetel Teletech) — and has enough time to play catch up with a game of gold at the golf course near his Gurugram home or at the Delhi Golf Club.

“I worked full time for over 25 years only to wonder what I am getting in return for toiling so hard. This is when I thought I need to get control over my time. Now I work as a virtual CFO. I can work from anywhere and have flexibility to take time off,” says Khanna. He co-founded the firm, Don’t Hire Be Virtual, in April 2018, which he says is seeing much traction post Covid with more and more companies looking to hire virtual CXOs.

Khanna started out on his own in 2018, much before the pandemic hit the world. At that time, organisations were sceptical to allow employees to work part-time or even temporarily, since they believed flexibility would impact productivity. Working from home or working from anywhere was unheard of. The pandemic kind of legalised flexible working models, and organisations world over are now using flexibility as a tool to retain talent.