Author: Dr. Prajjal Saha | HRKatha

Someone I know spent eight and a half years building the research function at a mid-sized communications agency. This was not a short tenure or a peripheral role. It represented eight and a half years of institutional knowledge, client relationships, and a deep understanding of how the organisation worked. One day, HR called. “Can you come with your laptop?” He assumed it was another work discussion. Until then, it always had been. It wasn’t. He was handed a full and final settlement and told the research function was being shut down. No warning. No transition period. No acknowledgement of what…

Someone I know works with one of the world’s largest technology and consulting firms. Based in India, mid-level, close to eight years with the same organisation. For most of that time, this person worked directly with the global team. Global colleagues were respectful. They valued your time. Feedback started with what was working before moving to what needed improving. Meetings happened at odd hours because of time zones, and that was genuinely inconvenient. But the work itself was calm. Professional. Dignified. Not particularly warm. Nobody was pretending to be a friend. But there was a quality that should be unremarkable…

Hire for potential, not just pedigree. Look beyond industry boundaries. Avoid groupthink. Value transferable capability. Bring in fresh perspective. Do not confuse familiarity with competence. Then HR hires for itself. And suddenly the function that champions adaptability becomes remarkably cautious. Every organisation hiring a senior HR professional eventually confronts the same question: should the hire come from the same industry or from outside it? The debate appears practical on the surface. In reality, it reveals something deeper about how HR understands its own value. Because the answer changes depending not only on the role, but on whether HR genuinely believes…

The logic behind retirement at 60 once made sense. India was younger. Jobs were scarce. Retirement created predictable generational turnover. A professional worked until 60, stepped aside, and created room for someone else. The system reflected the social realities of its time. Life expectancy was lower. A 60-year-old often looked and lived older than a 60-year-old does today. Children were usually financially independent by the time parents retired. The financial responsibilities associated with middle age had largely ended. That world has changed. A professional retiring at 60 today may have another twenty or thirty years of productive life ahead. Many…

The org chart did not predict this shift. Business urgency did. Corporate HR structures still suggest a clear hierarchy. The Chief Human Resources Officer at the top. Layers of Vice Presidents, Directors, and specialists underneath: talent acquisition, learning and development, compensation, employee relations, workforce planning, diversity, analytics. The structure implies that power flows downward through reporting lines. It rarely does. Inside HR, influence sits with people closest to business priorities, scarce organisational resources, and leadership access. Titles often predict very little. A Head of Executive Compensation with a small team may wield more influence than a Vice President overseeing a…

Happy HR Day. Across LinkedIn today, companies will celebrate HR as the “voice of employees,” “people champions,” or “culture custodians.” The language will be warm, reassuring, and deeply familiar. HR exists, employees are told, to support people. The problem is not that this is entirely false. The problem is that it is only partially true. HR does help employees. It resolves grievances, designs learning programmes, supports wellbeing initiatives, manages careers, and often acts as the first line of emotional support inside organisations. Many HR professionals enter the field precisely because they want to improve workplaces and help people navigate work…

A manufacturing engineer with twenty-five years in an automotive plant is an asset. They understand the production line, the tolerances that matter, the failure modes that recur, and the institutional knowledge that prevents expensive mistakes. Promotions follow experience. Compensation reflects accumulated expertise. Retirement, when it comes, is planned and ceremonial. A software engineer with twenty-five years in a large Indian IT services company occupies a different position. Expensive. Potentially rigid. Vulnerable during restructuring. The phrase “not keeping up with technology” becomes a convenient explanation for what is often a cost decision. Fresh graduates are cheaper, more “trainable,” and carry none…

The pattern is familiar enough that it no longer surprises. A senior leader exits. The succession discussion begins. And the person most people assumed would step in does not get the role. Inside the organisation, the reaction is usually a mix of surprise and quiet confusion. This was the dependable one. The person who knew where every lever sat, who could get decisions moving across silos, calm internal friction, and keep execution from collapsing under complexity. When something went wrong, this was the person people called. And yet, when the top job opened, the organisation chose someone else. Sometimes an…

The image circulated widely: a professional working from a parked car, laptop balanced precariously, joining calls between errands. Another showed someone crouched in a cinema hall, responding to emails before a film began. A third captured an employee on a metro platform, presentation open on a phone screen. These are not isolated incidents. They are signals of something deeper. The immediate reaction frames this as hustle, as commitment, as personal choice. The reality is structural. These moments reveal not dedication but the failure of management to create boundaries, prioritise outcomes over visibility, and distinguish urgency from performative availability. India’s work…

Somewhere between the job posting and the final interview, the real hiring decision has already been made. The candidate has not yet entered the process. The panel has not convened. The formal evaluation has not begun. And yet, the outcome is often no longer in doubt. A message has already circulated on a WhatsApp group. A founder has asked a peer, “Do you know someone good for this?” A quiet backchannel check has established who is considered credible, who is seen as risky, and who is unlikely to be considered at all. By the time the interview process starts, it…

On April 12th, 2026, Tata Consultancy Services issued a statement about allegations from its Nashik facility: “TCS has a long-standing zero-tolerance policy towards harassment and coercion of any form. As soon as we were made aware of the matter, we took swift action.” Two days later, Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran described the allegations as “gravely concerning and anguishing” and announced an internal investigation. The statements sound appropriate, concerned and decisive. Then consider what they are responding to. Eight women employees filed complaints alleging sustained harassment, coercion and intimidation between February 2022 and March 2026. Police investigations documented 78 emails…

Krish Shankar, former Group Head of HR at Infosys and founding mentor at Crossmentors, recently shared a presentation titled There Is A Lot Brewing! on the CHRO’s role in navigating the AI transformation. It was provocative, sweeping, and deliberately uncomfortable. In this conversation with Dr. Prajjal Saha, founder and editor of HRKatha, he unpacks a future where AI could shrink workforces, flatten organisations, and force leaders to confront difficult trade-offs between efficiency, control, and the human experience of work.  The AI-enabled workday You paint a future where every employee and manager is surrounded by AI agents. But let’s get specific.…

There is a seductive belief shaping corporate strategy today: that artificial intelligence will separate winners from losers based on how much of it they adopt. Buy the tools, deploy them widely, and performance will follow. The evidence suggests otherwise. A 2026 study by Lighthouse Research and Advisory, conducted in partnership with Cornerstone and drawing on responses from more than 1,000 executives and employees, points to a different dividing line. Organisations that combine workforce intelligence with the ability to act on it are 11 times more likely to describe themselves as highly adaptable to change. They are also seven to eight…

On Tuesday morning, March 31st, 2026, approximately 30,000 employees of Oracle across the United States, India, Canada and Mexico woke up to an email from “Oracle Leadership”. The message was brief. “After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organisational change. As a result, today is your last working day.” No advance notice. No conversation with managers. No call from HR. Just an email that arrived at 6 a.m., followed almost immediately by system lockouts that prevented employees from accessing their files, emails or colleagues. The…

Every office has an org chart. Clean boxes, neat lines, official titles that explain who reports to whom and who makes what decisions. Then there’s the real hierarchy. The one nobody prints or talks about. The one that decides whose opinions matter, whose emails get answered, and whose “just thinking out loud” somehow becomes company policy by Thursday. This hierarchy rarely follows titles. You could be a VP and still rank lower than a manager who has been around since the early days. You could be senior on paper and still wait three days for a reply, while someone else…

There is a number in NIIT’s 2026 India Skills Gap Report that should unsettle every vice-chancellor, HR director and policymaker in the country. Students rate their own readiness for the next career step at 57 out of 100. Academic leaders, assessing the same graduates, are broadly confident they will be employer-ready within three to five years. Employers, meanwhile, say skilled talent is available – but only 49 per cent are very confident in finding it, and 37 per cent say it takes real effort. Three groups. Three entirely different readings of the same reality. That is not a skills gap.…

The conflict in West Asia has introduced real uncertainty into global markets. Oil supply routes face disruption. Energy prices fluctuate. Supply chains adjust. Forecasts carry wider error bars than usual. Many HR leaders across India must be responding in familiar ways. Hiring slows. Training budgets are reviewed. Promotions are delayed. Major initiatives are paused pending “more clarity.” Each decision, considered individually, is rational. Why commit to fixed costs when revenue visibility is weak? Why invest in capability when the environment remains unclear? The problem is not that these decisions are irrational. The problem is that they are rational—and collectively destructive.…

Every company declares that retaining talent is a strategic priority. Annual reports emphasise culture and engagement. Leadership speaks of ‘people as our greatest asset.’ HR dashboards track attrition closely. Then examine the budget. The answer is consistent and uncomfortable: companies invest heavily in hiring and far less in retention. The disparity is structural and measurable—and reveals what organisations actually value. Where the money goes Hiring has infrastructure. Retention does not. Companies fund dedicated talent acquisition teams whose sole function is filling roles. They pay recruitment agencies significant fees, often a percentage of first-year salary. They invest in applicant tracking systems,…

Everyone is becoming a contractor, even with “full-time” titles. The modern employment system offers the worst of both worlds: the instability of contracting without the flexibility or compensation. It may be time to stop pretending and redesign employment for the reality that everyone is temporary. Full-time employment has become a performance. Employees receive titles, benefits packages and annual reviews that suggest permanence. Companies speak of career development, long-term vision and organisational belonging. Both sides maintain the fiction of stable employment whilst operating under very different assumptions. The reality is simpler and more uncomfortable: nearly everyone is now a contractor, regardless…

Three out of four educated women in India step away from their careers at some point. That is the striking finding of a new study by Axis Bank, which surveyed nearly 11,000 college-educated women across 42 Indian cities. The number challenges a common assumption in corporate India: that women primarily exit the workforce after childbirth. In fact, 74 per cent of respondents reported taking a career break at some stage. Even among women without children, 58 per cent had stepped away from work. Among mothers, the number rises to 88 per cent. The implication is uncomfortable for organisations. Career interruptions…

When a company builds artificial intelligence, its own workforce becomes the most visible proof. If the technology cannot improve how the builder operates, why should anyone else believe it works? That reality places unusual pressure on AI companies. Their HR departments are not just managing people—they are also proving that the products their organisations sell can function in the messy reality of work. Hiring, onboarding and performance reviews become experiments that either validate or undermine the promise of AI-enabled HR. The early results are revealing. Not because they demonstrate unambiguous success, but because they expose tensions that marketing materials often…

When Sam Altman declared that “listening to old people is the biggest mistake young people make,” the line detonated in workplaces already negotiating a fragile truce between speed and experience. Older workers felt dismissed. Younger ones felt vindicated. Neither reaction addresses the more interesting question: when does experience illuminate, and when does it obstruct? And what happens when organisations lose the ability to tell the difference? The issue is not whether Altman is right or wrong. It is whether institutions understand what kind of knowledge ages — and what kind compounds. When the advice is genuinely obsolete Start with what…

There’s a peculiar theatre that plays out in every organisation when someone resigns. It’s called the exit interview—a carefully choreographed performance where both sides recite lines they don’t mean, ask questions they don’t want answered, and maintain the comforting illusion that truth is being exchanged. It isn’t. The employee has already mentally left. HR has already drafted the summary. And yet, for thirty minutes, they sit across from each other and perform sincerity with the discipline of trained actors. The employee edits the truth because burning bridges is unprofessional. HR edits the truth because admitting systemic problems is inconvenient. Somewhere…

When consulting firms tie promotion to AI usage while threatening to “exit” resisters, they present the policy as capability building. It may be something more structural: a way to reshape the workforce, test organisational loyalty and modernise the firm’s image under the language of transformation. Accenture has begun tracking senior staff logins to its AI tools and linking promotion decisions to “regular adoption” of artificial intelligence. The firm has trained 550,000 of its 780,000 employees in generative AI and monitors weekly usage data. Its chief executive, Julie Sweet, told investors the company would “exit” employees who fail to get the…

Every organisation has a tidy org chart. The CEO at the top. Leadership below. Managers in the middle. It’s neat, logical, and completely irrelevant. Because real power doesn’t sit in the corner office. It lives in the server room, the accounts department, and the compliance officer’s cabin that nobody visits unless forced to. These people don’t have impressive titles. They’re not visionaries. They don’t inspire anyone. But they control the infrastructure—the servers, the budgets, the approvals—and in doing so, they control everything. Cross them, and your expense claim vanishes. Your system access gets “temporarily suspended”. Your project stalls for “compliance…

Internship programmes are proliferating even as their hiring yield declines. A survey by TeamLease EdTech of 932 Indian firms finds that nearly three-quarters intend to absorb only about a tenth of their interns as full-time employees. Opportunities have expanded by 25 per cent in the past year and by 135 per cent over five years. Conversions have not kept pace. The language of “talent pipelines” survives. The economics increasingly point elsewhere. Modern internships function less as pipelines than as structured courtships. Firms use them to test potential employees at low cost and limited risk. Interns use them to gather information,…