Author: Dr. Prajjal Saha | HRKatha

I must have been in school when I first heard the slogan. I was passing a trade union meeting, and the workers were chanting, “Aath ghante kaam, aath ghante aaraam, aath ghante manoranjan.” Eight hours of work, eight hours of rest and eight hours of recreation. I remember it because it sounded almost mathematical. A day divided into three equal parts, with work occupying precisely one of them. That memory returned when commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal, addressing the India-Netherlands Business Forum in The Hague on 26 October, told prospective investors that Indians wanted to work hard. “Nobody in…

A general manager at a large Indian steel conglomerate recently described an exchange with his boss, the president, that has become painfully familiar. An operational problem had surfaced. The GM, who also heads a business, examined the issue, worked through the possible solutions and presented what he believed was the most workable recommendation. The president disagreed. The proposal was not right, he said, adding that what the GM considered correct would not necessarily be so. The GM accepted the possibility. He could be wrong. What he wanted to know was what the president considered the right approach. He was willing…

Consider two employees beginning their careers. One joins a technology company as a junior analyst. The employee has an academic qualification, some theoretical knowledge and perhaps a few months of training, but little experience of solving real business problems. The work is largely procedural, closely supervised and designed to develop competence over time. Yet from the first day, the employee belongs to the white-collar workforce. The other joins a manufacturing facility as a technician. Over the next two decades, the technician learns to operate sophisticated equipment, diagnose complex failures, interpret technical data and make decisions that can determine whether an…

The video of what appears to be a meeting between employees and Genpact’s employee relations team contains an allegation that deserves to sit at the centre of any serious discussion about workplace grievance mechanisms. A manager had allegedly told his team: go ahead and complain to HR if you want. There are multiple complaints against me and nothing has been done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfoG5IX_CeA&t=9s Whether the manager actually made that statement remains to be established. But the fact that an employee recounted it during an internal grievance discussion is significant. It suggests that at least some employees had come to believe that…

A colleague leaves. The position is not immediately filled. The work, however, does not wait for the replacement. Some of it goes to the person sitting nearby, some moves to the manager, some is absorbed by technology and some is divided among the team. What initially looks like temporary cover gradually becomes the way the work gets done. Months later, the vacancy may still exist on paper. In practice, the organisation has discovered that it can live without it. This is one way jobs disappear without anybody losing one. Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2026 research gives the phenomenon a memorable name:…

The numbers that describe India’s GCC story in 2026 are impressive. More than 2,100 centres. About 2.36 million professionals. $98.4 billion in annual revenue. Overall hiring up 12 to 15 per cent in the first half of the year. New centres are opening. Existing ones are expanding. The narrative of India as the world’s capability hub appears intact. Look more carefully at what is happening inside those numbers and a different picture begins to form. Recent Dell Technologies-Zinnov research estimates that around 55 per cent of routine work inside Indian GCCs is exposed to AI-led automation. Nearly 60 per cent…

Central government employees and pensioners may receive their September salaries and pensions five days early, with the Centre allowing payments to be disbursed on Friday, 25 September, ahead of a proposed nationwide bank strike. The three-day strike is scheduled from 28 to 30 September. With 26 and 27 September falling on the weekend, branch-based banking services could face disruption for several consecutive days. September salaries and wages would ordinarily have been processed at the end of the month. Under the latest instructions, however, all central government employees, including those working in Defence, Posts and Telecommunications, may be paid on 25…

Ericsson and the Telecom Sector Skill Council (TSSC) have opened a Centre of Excellence at Government ITI Govandi in Mumbai to train young people in 5G and other emerging technologies. Around 300 students are expected to undergo training at the centre in its first year. The programme will cover 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), telecom product-line assembly and handheld-device repair, with practical training aimed at preparing participants for employment in the telecom and technology sectors. The initiative comes as the expansion of 5G networks and adoption of connected technologies create demand for workers who can deploy, operate and maintain telecom…

In the space of five weeks, the chairman of one of India’s most storied conglomerates announced that he would not seek another term, reversed that decision after a 4:1 board vote, and saw that reappointment challenged as illegal by the trusts that own 66 per cent of the holding company. N Chandrasekaran had said in August that he would not offer himself for reappointment when his current term ends in February 2027. On September 17, the Tata Sons board voted to give him another five-year term, with Noel Tata, chairman of Tata Trusts, opposing the resolution. Tata Trusts subsequently declared…

They did not arrive announcing themselves. They joined as analysts, engineers, content writers, recruiters and consultants. On paper, they looked like every other new hire. Then their managers noticed something. The presentation was ready before it should have been. The research summary covered more ground than expected. The first draft arrived the same morning it was requested. The analysis that usually took two days was on the manager’s desk by noon. Some managers were impressed. Others were suspicious. A few wondered whether corners were being cut. Perhaps the more interesting possibility is that this person simply works differently. Who is…

Nobody announced that work would change this way. There was no strategy document, pilot programme or change-management communication. An employee found that drafting an email took a fraction of the time it used to. An analyst discovered that interrogating a dataset that once took a day could be done in an hour. A recruiter stopped writing job descriptions from scratch. A manager who dreaded putting together presentations found the task considerably less painful. A programmer began reviewing code differently, and then writing it differently. Each of these decisions was individual. None was coordinated. Most were not reported to anyone. And…

Walk into almost any organisation and you will hear some version of it. In town halls, one-on-ones and all-hands addresses, leaders offer it as evidence of accessibility, an invitation to candour, a signal that uncomfortable truths are welcome. The invitation is usually genuine. The door, in the literal sense, is open. The problem is that neither changes the calculation every employee makes before deciding whether to walk through it. The calculation employees actually make When an employee considers sharing an uncomfortable truth with a leader, they are not primarily evaluating the sincerity of the invitation. They are evaluating the risk.…

Organisations have spent decades making hiring more structured, more consistent and more defensible. The promotion decision has received no comparable attention. A candidate being hired knows they are being assessed. They broadly understand what they are being evaluated on and have a formal opportunity to make their case. An employee being considered for promotion has none of these things reliably. The criteria are vague, the process is inconsistent, the decision is made by people who have formed opinions over years, and the outcome is typically announced rather than explained. The harder interview was never the one that determined whether someone…

Every year, organisations spend considerable money and management time pursuing workplace certifications. Employees are surveyed, submissions prepared, policies documented, results awaited and, when the recognition arrives, logos appear across careers pages, recruitment campaigns, social-media posts and annual reports. Yet ask a job seeker today, particularly someone in the first decade of their career, whether a workplace certification materially influences where they apply, and the answer is less certain. They check anonymous review platforms, look at how long people have stayed, speak to someone who works there or used to, and read between the lines of posts from current employees. The…

There is a test that every employee in every organisation applies, usually without naming it. It has nothing to do with the values on the wall or the culture deck from the last offsite. It has everything to do with what they watch happening around them, week after week, year after year. Who moves up. Who gets rewarded. Who survives something they shouldn’t have. Who doesn’t survive something they should have. Four questions. The answers, accumulated over time, tell employees far more about an organisation than anything its leadership has ever said about culture. Who gets promoted Every organisation says…

A senior television journalist, who now runs his own YouTube channel, was speaking to a student at Jantar Mantar during the recent protests. At some point in the conversation, the young woman said that the Prime Minister should address their concerns. Then, almost in the same breath, she added: share your location, we will come to you. He gently corrected her. The Prime Minister is likely in Parliament right now. The young woman was not being disrespectful. She was not being naive. She was operating from her own instincts about how you connect with someone you want to meet. In…

Something significant is happening to India’s technology workforce in 2026. Most people are describing the symptoms. Very few are examining the cause. Indian IT services firms are reducing headcount at levels not seen in the sector’s history. TCS, the country’s largest IT employer, reduced its workforce by approximately 2 per cent in FY26, its largest single-year reduction in recent memory, citing a pivot to an AI-first delivery model. Media reports suggest that across India’s five largest IT services firms, more than 80,000 roles disappeared in the eighteen months to mid-2025. These were not cuts driven by financial distress. Revenues remain…

Ask more than 1,40,000 people across 107 countries what troubles them most about their nation, and work emerges as one of the world’s defining anxieties. A median of 10 per cent name work-related issues as their country’s biggest problem, second only to the economy. The headline number is unsurprising. What sits beneath it is not. The broad patterns behave as expected. Countries with higher unemployment produce more citizens who call work their nation’s chief problem: South Africa, where joblessness tops 30 per cent, leads the rankings, alongside Lesotho and Gabon. The relationship is real, if not tight (r=0.49). Income tells…

I was speaking recently to the HR Head of a mid-sized IT company about hiring. We were discussing how recruitment had changed when he said something that caught me by surprise. “Interviews have become much harder.” The remark sounded odd. Technology was supposed to make hiring easier. Virtual interviews removed the need to travel. Recruiters could schedule more conversations in a day. AI could summarise résumés, generate questions and structure feedback. Everything about the process appeared more efficient. He smiled. “That’s exactly the problem.” His concern was not with senior leadership hiring, where years of visible achievement, business judgement and…

There is a particular kind of trust between an employer and an employee who leaves their child at a company-run creche. It is not the trust of a consumer choosing a daycare from a directory. It is not an independent decision made after personal research and site visits. It is trust extended because the company offered the facility, placed it on company premises, and implicitly said: we have taken care of this for you. That is a different kind of promise. And it carries a different kind of responsibility. The parents of the children at Capgemini’s Brookefield campus creche in…

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…