Finalist, Young HR Turk | Second Runner-Up, Happiness Ambassador | HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Awards 2025 Every HR initiative Hevin Verghese supports must answer three questions: What problem are we solving? What are we doing differently? How will we know it worked? The questions appear straightforward, but they reflect a distinction Verghese considers important. Introducing a programme is not the same as improving an outcome, and HR must be able to demonstrate the difference. As senior manager, human resource at Petronet LNG’s Kochi Terminal, Verghese brings that approach to a function spanning employee engagement, learning and development, wellbeing, statutory compliance,…
Author: HRKatha Editorial Team
OpenAI has appointed Shruti Nishchal as HR business partner (HRBP), Asia-Pacific (APAC), based in Singapore. She announced her move in October 2026, following a six-year stint at Netflix. Nishchal brings over 14 years of experience across human resources, with expertise in HR business partnering, diversity and inclusion, performance management, talent development, succession planning, leadership development, organisational design and mergers and acquisitions. Before joining OpenAI, Nishchal served as director-HRBP for ads, marketing and partnerships across APAC at Netflix from January to October 2026. Prior to that, she was senior manager – HRBP for product, legal and finance across APAC from August…
Transformation looks different depending on where one sits in the organisational hierarchy. From the boardroom, restructuring may represent strategic realignment. An AI rollout promises productivity. Further down the organisation, the same initiatives can mean additional responsibilities, unfamiliar systems and workloads that expand without corresponding rewards. That divide emerges from the ‘2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust at Work’, based on a survey of 10,018 employees across ten countries, including India, China, Japan, Germany, Brazil, South Africa, the UAE, the UK, the US and Canada. Among senior management respondents, classified as executives in the study, 9 per cent reported a…
‘Enterprise-ready’ is among the most frequently used terms in the software industry. Payroll vendors routinely promise it, but the gap between that promise and operational reality often becomes apparent only after implementation. And that gap is not always about scale. More often, it is about exceptions. The exception-management problem There is a persistent assumption that payroll becomes complex as organisations get larger, for instance, when a company scales from 500 to 5,000 employees. But headcount alone is not what makes payroll difficult to manage. The greater challenge lies in the exceptions that accumulate as a business grows. Consider an organisation…
Hema Lakra’s interest in people and organisations began with Economics. What fascinated her was the relationship between economic trends, business decisions and human behaviour, and how changes in one could influence the others. That curiosity eventually took her into HR, where she has spent more than two decades working with organisations through different stages of change. Today, as director, HR, Technology Business, at NatWest, Lakra brings that perspective to a function where technological and organisational priorities are continually evolving. Her experience of leading large-scale transformations has reinforced a belief that may seem counterintuitive in senior leadership: credibility does not require…
In her second week at GEODIS, Sheerin Ansari, assistant general manager, human resource, GEODIS, was approached by a member of the support staff who had noticed something unusual about her. “Ma’am, it feels so nice that you ask how I’m doing.” It was a small remark, but one that stayed with her. Ansari had simply been checking in, something she considered an ordinary part of interacting with colleagues. Yet, the response suggested that such attention was not necessarily as commonplace as she had assumed. For Ansari, the experience reinforced a belief that has shaped her career in HR: meaningful communication…
After over nine years with Onward Technologies, Sujata Singh has been promoted to chief human resources officer (CHRO). She has been associated with the software and technology-services outsourcing company since 2017 when she took up the role of senior vice president and global HR head. Over four years into this role came her first promotion that made her executive vice president and global head-human resources in April of 2022. Backed by well over two decades of experience, Singh has come a long way having begun as a management trainee with Lupin Pharmaceuticals, in 1998. A year later she moved to…
Organisations rarely allow their business performance to go unexamined. Revenue, costs, growth targets and operational efficiency are reviewed at regular intervals. Yet one factor that can determine whether those ambitions are realised often receives far less systematic attention: organisational culture. For Sushil Baveja, CHRO, Jindal Stainless, that imbalance needs correcting. Speaking at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Baveja argued that culture should become an integral part of the regular business agenda rather than remain a separate HR initiative. “Culture in today’s context, I think, is a theme which needs a regular review, stocktaking,” he observed. His…
Sugata Roy’s journey into HR began in an unlikely place: a genetics laboratory. Before pursuing an MBA in HR, he studied physiology and genetics, disciplines that taught him to look beyond what was immediately visible and investigate the systems producing an outcome. Understanding a biological process meant asking questions, examining evidence and identifying relationships that were not always apparent at first glance. That habit of inquiry stayed with him when he moved from studying human biology to understanding human behaviour at work. At Vodafone Idea, Roy applies a similar curiosity to organisations. He sees performance, engagement and retention not as…
Collaboration appears on countless corporate values statements. But its importance becomes considerably easier to understand when the business has nine to 12 months to deliver a gigawatt-scale solar project. For Milmil Das, CHRO, Jakson Green, collaboration in such an environment is not simply about creating a more harmonious workplace. It is fundamental to execution. Speaking at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Das described the demands of delivering large-scale renewable-energy projects against tight timelines. “We have to deliver within nine to 12 months, which is very tough,” he said. That kind of deadline leaves little room for…
Purpose is easy to put into a statement. It is harder to make employees feel it in their everyday work. For Jaya Suri, CHRO, Kimbal, the connection becomes much more tangible when employees can see the people whose lives their work affects. Speaking at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Suri described how Kimbal, which operates in electricity, smart metering and battery power systems, tries to connect employees with the larger significance of what they do. Electricity, after all, is more than infrastructure. Its arrival can change how a family lives, works and learns. Suri recalled the…
Change management was built around a reassuring assumption: change would eventually end. There was a beginning, a period of disruption and, finally, a new normal. Rajita Singh, chief people officer – India & global delivery HR leader, Kyndryl believes that assumption no longer holds. “Change is not an event. It’s become the environment,” says Singh, in the latest episode of The CHRO Playbook. Employees are no longer dealing with one transformation at a time. AI is changing work while business models shift, cost pressures intensify, skills become obsolete and changes outside the workplace continue simultaneously. The difficulty, Singh argues, lies…
The Black Swan was supposed to be rare. In today’s workplace, it can sometimes feel almost routine. For Mrinal Sinha, chief people officer, Axis Max Life Insurance, that captures something important about the environment organisations are operating in. AI is advancing, consumer behaviour is shifting, workplaces are becoming increasingly multigenerational and employee expectations are changing alongside all of them. Speaking at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Sinha pointed to an interesting overlap between the consumer and the employee. The same aspirational Indian buying a credit card, he observed, may also be an employee. The expectations shaped…
Swarna Latha Buravalli once imagined becoming a scientist. Early marriage and motherhood in her late teens changed that trajectory, and her career eventually took her into HR. Years later, there is an unexpected symmetry to where she has arrived. At Skyroot Aerospace, she works alongside the engineers and scientists building India’s private space ambitions, shaping the organisation in which they do that work. The environment has influenced how she thinks about HR itself. The engineers around her will iterate repeatedly on a component rather than accept something that does not meet the required standard. “This changes how you think about…
Trust takes time to build. It can disappear remarkably quickly. For Dev Jha, CHRO, India Glycols, that makes trust one of the more important dimensions of organisational culture, particularly as AI begins to reshape the relationship between people, managers and work itself. Speaking at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Jha pointed to what he sees as a worrying shift in the workplace: trust between employees and managers, and between employees and management, appears to be diminishing. The arrival of AI makes that relationship more complicated. As humans and AI increasingly work alongside one another, organisations will…
Organisations measure almost everything that matters to their health. Revenue, productivity, attrition, engagement and performance all find their way onto dashboards. Culture, despite being invoked as an explanation for everything from retention to transformation, remains considerably harder to pin down. Sulbha Kaushal Rai, chief growth & transformation officer, RenewBuy, has an interesting analogy for that contradiction: culture is like breath. “You measure your heart rate, you measure your blood, but you never measure your breath,” she observed at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics. “And without breath, you’re not alive.” For Rai, culture occupies a similar place…
How does an employee know when to go beyond the job description to delight a customer? Or when a process needs to give way to an understanding of what the customer needs in that particular moment? For Sanjay Bose, EVP & head-HR, ITC Hotels, this is where organisational culture stops being an abstract idea and becomes visible in behaviour. Speaking at the first HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics, Bose argued that culture is perhaps the hospitality industry’s biggest differentiator. Processes can establish consistency, but they cannot prescribe every interaction between an employee and a guest. “There is…
Finalist | HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Award 2025 Hiral Patel’s idea of relationship-building does not stop at the office door. For him, understanding an employee can sometimes mean understanding something of the life surrounding the job: the family circumstances, pressures and aspirations that rarely appear in an HR system but inevitably travel to work with the person. In some instances, that has included meeting employees’ families. Patel does not present this as an HR formula, but as part of his own relationship-led approach to the function. His larger point is that trust is difficult to build if HR knows employees…
Newgen Software has plenty of talented people. For its global CHRO Kashish Kapoor, that does not necessarily settle the talent question. When Kapoor joined the company, she found what she describes as a huge pool of talent. The harder question was whether the capabilities Newgen had today were aligned with where the business wanted to go tomorrow. As the company moves from being an enterprise software business towards becoming an AI-led product company, that distinction has become increasingly important. In the latest episode of The CHRO Playbook, powered by enParadigm, Kapoor joins Dr Prajjal Saha, founder & editor, HRKatha, and…
By April 2025, nearly 25 per cent of internet users in high-income countries had adopted ChatGPT, compared with 5.8 per cent in upper-middle-income countries, 4.7 per cent in lower-middle-income countries and just 0.7 per cent in low-income countries, according to the ‘World Bank’s World Development Report 2026: The Promise of Artificial Intelligence’. Put those numbers together and ChatGPT use among internet users in high-income countries was about 36 times that in low-income countries. The difference in exposure to generative AI is nowhere near as large. The report estimates that 14.2 per cent of jobs in high-income countries are amenable to…
Identifying a capable successor does not mean the succession plan will work. For Jeeva Balakrishnan, CHRO, Cholamandalam Investment & Finance, three things must come together: the individual’s aspiration, the individual’s capability and the organisation’s talent needs. If they do not, an organisation can invest heavily in a successor only to find itself back at the starting point. In this excerpt from HRKatha Futurecast: The Future of Succession in BFSI, held in association with People Business, Balakrishnan explains why the CEO must own succession while the CHRO builds the infrastructure that develops people for future roles.
A successor may be announced at the end of a leadership transition, but the preparation can begin years earlier. Drawing on DBS Bank, Priti Singh, chief people officer, Universal Sompo General Insurance, argues that future CEOs need deliberate exposure across different parts of the business before they are ready for the top role. For Singh, building that depth internally also reduces an organisation’s dependence on buying leadership talent from outside. In this excerpt from HRKatha Futurecast: The Future of Succession in BFSI, held in association with People Business, she explains why strong succession is ultimately about building leaders, not merely…
Winner, Rewards Guru | HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Awards 2025 Gaurav Modak was not supposed to be the person leading the discussion. He had joined a RemCo conversation involving executive salary decisions and market data to support his manager with analysis and background material. Then his manager had to drop out at the last moment, leaving Modak to take the room himself. He went back through the material, reconstructed how similar conversations had been handled before, anticipated the questions that were likely to surface and stepped in. The meeting went well enough to earn appreciation from the HR director…
Succession planning is often treated as an HR process. For Saba Adil, CHRO, Edelweiss Life Insurance, that view is increasingly inadequate. She argues that succession is really the outcome of a much deeper talent-management process: identifying who is ready now and who could be ready later, recognising critical talent, investing meaningfully in development and testing whether potential leaders can handle greater responsibility. But there is another shift underway. Succession is moving beyond HR to become an organisational agenda, with the CEO, boards and nomination and remuneration committees playing a more active role. In this excerpt from HRKatha Futurecast: The Future…
First Runner-Up | HRKatha Rising Star Leadership Awards 2025 Himanshu Gupta has spent much of his career on the design side of HR: building performance and rewards structures, integrating policies and creating frameworks where established ones were either absent or no longer fit for purpose. That distinction has shaped how he thinks about the function. HR, in his view, creates value when its systems are closely connected to the way a business actually competes, grows and allocates resources, rather than when it simply administers processes efficiently. His career has given him several vantage points on that problem. Consulting assignments at…
Interviewed by Tata’s Russi Mody in 1977, GS Ramesh was asked where he wanted to start his career. “Where did you start, sir?” he asked back. Coal mines, came the answer. So Ramesh chose the coal mines too. Twenty years at Tata taught him what he calls the human side of business. Twelve years at Hyundai, as its first Indian employee, taught him discipline and evidence over instinct. Somewhere between the two, he coined a word for the synthesis he was building: Hyundian. Those experiences would eventually shape the way he built Layam, a name drawn from “Lay”, the Hindi…