Author: Dr. Prajjal Saha | HRKatha

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.…

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…

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…

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,…

Every knowledge worker recognises the phenomenon. A project sits frozen on a digital task board, its status unchanged for weeks. The internal discussion channel has gone quiet. Nobody genuinely believes it will ever be completed, yet it remains officially “active”. Welcome to the world of zombie projects — initiatives that are neither alive enough to progress nor decisively shut down. The scale of the problem is striking. Research by Atlassian surveying thousands of office workers globally suggests that nearly half began 2026 weighed down by such undead initiatives. More troubling, over 90 per cent report tangible consequences: stress from cluttered…

A manager at a Bengaluru tech company noticed something odd. Her Gen Z team routinely questioned her decisions and pushed back on direction. But when one team member quietly started using a new productivity tool, the entire team followed within days — no mandate, no approval, no discussion required. When asked why, the answer was simple: “Everyone’s using it.” This is the Gen Z paradox. They won’t follow you because you’re the boss. But they will follow one another instantly, at scale, without hesitation. By 2030, Gen Z will make up nearly 30 per cent of the global workforce. Understanding…

On 1 February , 2026, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Yuva Shakti Budget—Rs 32,666 crore for Labour, Rs 9,886 crore for skills (62 per cent jump), and Rs 20,083 crore for employment schemes. The headline numbers are impressive. But what actually changes for employees, HR teams, and employers? Here are the 15 things you need to know. Money & Compensation 1. No tax relief for employees—increment burden falls entirely on employers What changed: New Income Tax Act 2025 (April 1, 2026) brings no slab changes, no Section 80C increase, no higher standard deduction. What it means: Employee take-home increases…

If aliens ever study corporate life, they’ll be baffled by one thing above all: our complete inability to choose the right communication format. We schedule hour-long meetings to share information that could fit in three bullet points. Then we fire off vague emails about complex, emotionally charged issues that desperately need a conversation. It’s as if we’ve collectively agreed that the worst possible medium is always the correct one. This isn’t about efficiency. It’s about a deeper workplace pathology: we’ve lost all sense of what actually requires human interaction and what doesn’t. The result? A daily carnival of miscommunication, wasted…

While Budget 2026 has been sold as a Rs 42,000 crore wager on India’s talent pipeline, its operational consequences for HR leaders lie elsewhere. A new income-tax regime comes into force on April 1. Artificial intelligence finally receives explicit government attention as a job disruptor. And some of the most consequential workforce problems—wages, social security and informalisation—are once again left untouched. For CHROs, this is a budget of adjustments, not relief. Take-home reality The new Income Tax Act, effective April 1, promises simplification: rationalised TDS and TCS rates, integrated assessment and penalty proceedings, cleaner compliance. For employees, the impact is…

When India’s finance minister unveiled the so-called “Yuva Shakti Budget”, the numbers did the shouting.  Rs 32,666 crore for labour,  Rs 9,886 crore for skills,  Rs 20,083 crore for employment incentives. In total, more than  Rs 42,000 crore aimed at turning India’s youthful population into a productive workforce. For human-resources leaders, however, the question is not whether the sums are impressive. It is whether any of this money will show up where it matters most: in interview rooms. India has heard ambitious promises on employability before. Degrees multiplied. Certificates flourished. Hiring managers remained unimpressed. JaiKrishna B, enterprise and family business…

Last week, workforce strategist Amanda Goodall reignited the cycle by calling to “remove 90 per cent of HR.” The post went viral. Thousands shared it. Comments split cleanly between employees saying “finally” and HR professionals rushing to defend the function. What’s interesting is not the outrage. It’s the repetition. This debate resurfaces every few years. Different person. Same argument. Identical response pattern. “HR is useless bureaucracy.” “HR prevents lawsuits.” “HR protects companies, not workers.” “That’s literally the job.” Round and round. The cycle repeats because the underlying tension never resolves. HR cannot serve two masters—legal protection for the company and…

Harvard economist Gita Gopinath delivered Davos’s most uncomfortable statistic: since the 1980s, only 30 per cent of India’s growth has come from labour. The rest? Capital. For a country that spent decades celebrating its demographic dividend, this represents fundamental failure. India hasn’t chosen to be capital-intensive—regulatory friction forced it. Companies opted for machines rather than navigate labour laws. This isn’t India-specific. It’s pattern recognition playing out globally: capital replacing labour faster than new jobs emerge, skills gaps widening faster than training adapts, regulatory complexity making buying machines easier than hiring people. Five themes from Davos make clear this is accelerating.…

Spotify largely avoids leadership approval for routine product features. Squads, small teams owning specific user experiences, make those calls based on user data, technical constraints, and strategic direction. Leadership ensures squads understand company strategy, removes obstacles, and coordinates dependencies. The result is speed. Spotify ships faster than competitors with centralised approval models, not because their engineers are superior, but because decisions happen where information lives rather than where hierarchy lives. Netflix operates similarly. Their “context, not control” philosophy means leaders provide clarity on company goals and then trust teams to decide. Approval chains are minimal. Formal review gates are few.…