Many hats, one identity: What Soham Parekh’s case reveals about remote work and HR governance

ethical moonlighting end and professional misconduct begin?

Parekh eventually acknowledged that he had held several roles at the same time, framing his actions as a response to financial hardship and economic insecurity. In interviews, he denied outsourcing his work or relying on AI automation, emphasizing instead the pressures of supporting family obligations amid an unstable global tech market. From an HR perspective, such explanations complicate simplistic narratives of fraud.

While working multiple full-time roles without disclosure clearly violates the spirit, if not always the letter of employment expectations, the case also reflects broader structural inequities. Wage disparities between the global North and South, the precariousness of startup employment, and the erosion of long-term job security all shape how individuals navigate work opportunities. The Parekh’s case thus sits at the intersection of personal agency and systemic dysfunction.

What the case exposes about HR practices in startups

Perhaps the most striking revelation from the case is how little formal governance existed in many of the affected organizations. Several founders admitted that their companies lacked exclusivity clauses, robust contracts, or standardized onboarding procedures. Performance management was often limited to sprint updates and informal check-ins, with trust functioning as the primary control mechanism. For early-stage startups, this approach is understandable. Speed is currency, and extensive HR infrastructure is often seen as a luxury.

Yet the Parekh episode underscores the risks of conflating agility with informality. When roles, expectations, and boundaries are poorly defined, organizations become vulnerable not only to deliberate misuse but also to misaligned assumptions about commitment and availability.

Rethinking background checks and onboarding

Another lesson emerging from the controversy concerns recruitment diligence. While startups often pride themselves on unconventional hiring, the absence of basic verification processes can be costly. Lightweight background checks, reference validation, and structured onboarding are not antithetical to innovation; rather, they provide a foundation for sustainable growth. Importantly, such practices must be applied consistently and ethically, avoiding discriminatory assumptions about geography or background. The goal is not to police employees but to ensure clarity and fairness from the outset of the employment relationship.

Is Surveillance a substitute for trust?

In response to such cases, some organizations have turned to aggressive monitoring and surveillance tools. While legally permissible in some jurisdictions, excessive monitoring raises serious ethical concerns around privacy, dignity, and psychological safety. Chief HR Officers must resist reactive, control-heavy responses that erode trust in the name of preventing misconduct.

Ethical governance lies not in watching employees more closely, but in aligning expectations more clearly. Disclosure-based models, where employees are required to declare outside engagements, are ethically superior to covert surveillance because they preserve autonomy while enforcing accountability.

Equity, global labour, and ethical consistency

The case also raises uncomfortable questions about equity in global hiring. When organizations recruit talent from lower-income regions without harmonizing expectations, compensation, and job security, ethical responsibility does not rest solely with the worker.

Structural inequalities and economic precarity shape behaviour. Ethical HR leadership requires consistency: the same standards of disclosure, workload, and accountability must apply regardless of geography, while also recognizing differential vulnerabilities. Selective moral outrage targeting individuals without examining systemic incentives undermines ethical credibility.

Ethical breach versus contractual violation

For CHROs, the Soham Parekh episode is not merely a cautionary tale about moonlighting; it is a stress test of the ethical and legal foundations of modern employment relationships. At its core, the case exposes a widening gap between the values organizations espouse—trust, autonomy, flexibility—and the governance mechanisms required to sustain those values at scale.

From an ethical standpoint, simultaneously holding multiple full-time roles without disclosure undermines the principle of good faith that anchors the employer-employee relationship. Even in the absence of explicit contractual prohibitions, employees are ethically bound to honesty regarding availability, commitment, and conflicts of interest.

For organizations, ethical employment is not defined solely by what is legally enforceable, but by whether expectations are communicated transparently and honoured reciprocally. Legally, however, the situation is more nuanced. In many startups, particularly early-stage or cross-border arrangements, employment contracts are either informal or silent on exclusivity, secondary employment, and conflict-of-interest disclosures. In such contexts, the legal grounds for termination or action may be weak, even when ethical norms are clearly violated. This mismatch between moral expectations and legal enforceability is precisely where CHROs must intervene.

The Chief HR Officer’s responsibility

CHROs occupy a fiduciary role not only toward employees, but also toward the organization, its investors, and its clients. Allowing ambiguous employment terms exposes organizations to operational risk, data security threats, intellectual property leakage, and reputational damage. Ethical lapses, when left unaddressed, quickly become governance failures.

The Parekh’s case demonstrates that trust without structure is not ethical leadership; it is abdication of responsibility. Ethical HR practice requires designing systems that protect trust through clarity, clear contracts, clearly articulated norms, and clearly defined consequences. Ultimately, the lesson for CHROs is: ethics cannot be retrofitted after a crisis. It must be architected into the employment system itself. This includes:

• What ethical standards apply regardless of geography or employment classification

• Disclosure norms framed as ethical obligations, not punitive controls

• Whether and how secondary employment must be disclosed

• Explicit conflict-of-interest and exclusivity clauses

• Onboarding processes that address ethical expectations, not just performance goals

• Leadership messaging that reinforces integrity over hustle culture

• How time, availability, and performance are evaluated.

Moving forward: Guardrails, not walls

The long-term impact of the Parekh case may lie in how organizations respond. Some companies have turned to monitoring software and stricter controls, while others advocate for renewed emphasis on communication and ethical leadership. The most sustainable path likely lies between these extremes.

Effective HR governance in remote-first environments requires thoughtfully designed guardrails, clear policies, transparent contracts, and supportive management practices that strike a balance between flexibility and accountability. Such guardrails protect not only organizations but also their employees, providing clarity in an increasingly complex and ambiguous world of work.

Moreover, moving forward requires resisting the impulse to treat the Soham Parekh case merely as a cautionary tale of deception. Such a reductive reading risks obscuring the human conditions that often underpin these choices. Economic volatility, family responsibilities, and the growing normalization of hustle culture create contexts in which juggling extreme workloads across multiple roles may appear rational, if not justified.

HR professionals are uniquely positioned to respond constructively to these pressures by cultivating organizational culture that promotes openness around workload, financial stress, and career aspirations. When employees feel able to articulate their constraints and needs without fear of reprisal, organizations are better equipped to intervene early, thereby reducing the likelihood of covert and high-risk behaviours.

Conclusion

The Soham Parekh episode is ultimately less about one individual and more about a system under strain. It reveals how rapid technological change, globalized labour markets, and startup cultures of speed can outpace the evolution of HR practices.

For HR leaders and founders alike, the lesson is clear: trust remains central to remote work, but trust without structure is precarious. By reimagining hiring, onboarding, and performance management through a human-centred yet disciplined lens, organizations can build remote teams that are both agile and ethical. In doing so, they move closer to a future of work that values transparency as much as talent, and integrity as much as innovation.

For CHROs, therefore, the real risk exposed by the Parekh case is not employee dishonesty alone; it is ethical under-design. In an era of remote work and fragmented careers, ethical leadership requires more than trust; it requires intentional governance. The organizations that will thrive are those that treat ethics not as a compliance function, but as a core design principle of the future of work.

DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and does not necessarily subscribe to it. will not be responsible for any damage caused to any person or organisation directly or indirectly.