Author: Dr. Prajjal Saha | HRKatha

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.…

Remember Tata Nano? The Rs 1 lakh car that was supposed to revolutionise Indian mobility? It didn’t fail because the engineering was poor. It failed because Tata positioned it as the “cheapest car in India.” That single word, cheapest, killed any aspiration to own it. Nobody wants to be seen driving the cheapest anything. The positioning created a perception problem the product could never escape. Here’s what’s interesting: Tata built Nano with genuine intent. Make car ownership accessible to millions. Replace dangerous two-wheelers carrying entire families. Democratise mobility. Noble goal. But the execution—obsessive focus on hitting Rs 1 lakh price…

This week, Forbes predicted 2026 will finally end the college degree’s dominance as workplace bootcamps become standard and traditional credentials carry less weight in a skills-first market. It’s a seductive prediction. Progressive. Egalitarian. Emotionally satisfying. It’s also dangerous nonsense that will cost workers who believe it. Here’s the tell, buried three paragraphs into the same breathless prediction: bachelor’s degree holders earn 68 per cent more per week than those with just high school diplomas. Skills-first hiring is supposedly ending degree tyranny, yet degree holders earn sixty-eight per cent more. Not declining. Not narrowing. Sixty-eight per cent more, right now, while…

I spoke with Subir Sinha just two weeks ago. We talked for hours that evening, and he was hopeful—genuinely optimistic about his recovery. He told me about the projects he was working on, the startups he was helping, the people he was connecting. Even battling cancer, Subir was thinking about others. That was who he was. Subir passed away on December 26, 2025, at 58. He may not have been one of those “big league” CHROs speaking at conferences or writing viral LinkedIn posts. And that’s perfectly fine. Not everyone needs to be famous to be exceptional. Not every successful…

Somewhere between 1,80,000 tech layoffs globally and the invention of ‘job-hugging’ as a workplace trend, 2025 became the year Indian workplaces stopped pretending. The masks came off. What we found underneath wasn’t pretty, but at least it was honest. “We’re a Family” finally died After years of companies calling themselves “families” whilst laying off thousands via Zoom, the metaphor mercifully expired in 2025. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced major workforce cuts. Microsoft eliminated 9,000 employees. Indian startups shed 9,500 jobs across the year. Nobody called these families. They called them “strategic workforce optimisations” and “AI-driven restructuring”—which is at least honest…

A fintech startup CEO recently hired a CHRO from a Fortune 500 bank. Twenty years’ experience, managed 5,000+ employees, built award-winning programmes. Within six months, the company was drowning in approval hierarchies whilst competitors hired faster. The CEO was baffled. He’d hired brilliance. What went wrong? Everything—because he’d hired credentials for the wrong context. But it’s not just startup versus corporate. A manufacturing CHRO joining IT services faces similar failure. So does an IT CHRO joining BFSI. An e-commerce CHRO struggles in pharmaceuticals. A services CHRO flounders in product companies. HR expertise doesn’t transfer across contexts because the contexts demand…

Social media erupted when MP Supriya Sule introduced the Right to Disconnect Bill, 2025 in Parliament. LinkedIn posts celebrated the end of after-hours emails. Twitter debated work-life balance. WhatsApp groups shared fantasies of ignoring Sunday night messages without career consequences. The bill sounds transformative: employees legally protected from work communication outside designated hours. An Employees’ Welfare Authority monitoring compliance. Companies with 10+ employees must negotiate disconnection rules. Overtime requires mutual consent and compensation. No disciplinary action for non-response. This follows Kerala becoming India’s first state with disconnection legislation, drawing inspiration from France, Portugal, and Spain. The provisions are substantive, not…

Two thousand flights cancelled in five days. Everyone’s analysing operational failure, regulatory non-compliance, passenger chaos. What nobody’s discussing: ground staff abandoned at check-in counters whilst leadership remained invisible, and the HR function that watched this disaster approach for two years without raising alarms loud enough to matter. IndiGo’s real failure wasn’t operational. It was human. And it exposes what happens when HR becomes so obsessed with cost control that it forgets its fundamental responsibility: protecting the organisation from itself. The scene at the counters Picture check-in counters during the crisis. Ground staff earning perhaps Rs 25,000 monthly faced hours of…

The shadow job market has industrialised, and nobody’s paying attention. According to Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence’s report, forums posted twice as many résumés and job listings in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023. Those numbers haven’t dropped—they’ve plateaued at crisis levels. This isn’t fringe activity confined to hardened criminals. It’s a structured labour market where 69 per cent of job seekers openly state they’ll take any paid opportunity, from programming to running scams to high-stakes cyber operations. The most alarming statistic: the median job seeker age is just 24, with marked teenage presence. India’s young workforce—celebrated for technical skills and…

Every workplace has its own language—a peculiar dialect where words mean everything except what they actually say. It’s a place where “We need to be more agile” translates to “We have no idea what we’re doing,” and “Let’s take this offline” means “I disagree with you but refuse to do so publicly.” Welcome to the corporate phrasebook, where euphemism reigns supreme and clarity goes to die. The Time Stealers “Quick sync” Translation: A 45-minute meeting that could have been a two-line email. Nothing about it will be quick. Someone will share their screen and struggle with audio for the first…

After decades of working under colonial-era labour laws, India’s workforce woke up on November 22, 2024, to a fundamentally different employment landscape. The new Labour Codes 2025 don’t just shuffle paperwork—they rewrite the rules on your salary, your rights, your safety, and your future. Whether you’re a permanent employee, a contract worker, a gig worker delivering food, or someone working from home, these changes affect you directly. Here’s what you need to know about your new rights and what’s changing in your working life. Money: wages, salaries, and benefits 1. Everyone gets a minimum wage—no exceptions  What’s new: Every single…

India’s government has enacted what it calls “historic” labour reform—consolidating 29 laws into four codes covering wages, industrial relations, social security, and workplace safety. The consolidation is real. The promises are substantial: simpler compliance, stronger protections, universal minimum wages, social security for gig workers. The question isn’t whether these codes are well-intentioned—they clearly are. It’s whether the implementation framework exists to make them functional. The codes provide the blueprint. Success depends entirely on building the infrastructure, capacity, and alignment that legislation alone cannot create. Making formalisation economically rational Ninety per cent of India’s workforce remains informal—not because registration is impossible,…

India woke up on 22 November to a fundamentally different labour regime. No warning, no grace period, no phased rollout. The government implemented four labour codes consolidating 29 laws, many dating to the British Raj. Old statutes stand repealed. New rules apply immediately—except where state-level regulations haven’t been notified yet, which is most places. For organisations, this creates an unusual predicament: comply with laws whose implementation details don’t yet exist. The government’s advice? Follow existing rules during transition. This is rather like being told to drive on new roads still under construction. Yet beneath the implementation chaos lies something genuinely…

India’s Global Capability Centre story sounds like unstoppable triumph. Over 1,800 centres employing 1.9 million professionals. Projections suggesting growth to 2,600 centres and $470-600 billion by 2030, potentially creating 2.6-3.9 million jobs. Government and industry leaders celebrate India as the “global hub for GCCs.” But here’s what nobody’s saying: this growth trajectory assumes something that isn’t happening—a fundamental transformation in how India develops, deploys, and retains talent across vastly different sectors and geographies. The GCC boom is racing toward multiple talent walls simultaneously. The sector complexity nobody discusses GCCs aren’t monolithic. Technology accounts for just 20 per cent of India’s…

The sticky organisations of tomorrow won’t be those offering the highest salaries or fanciest perks. They’ll be the ones offering the best managers—the kind who make people want to stay, grow, and belong. This isn’t motivational rhetoric but cold economic logic. Yet too many organisations—in India and globally—still default to compensation as their primary retention lever, then watch attrition reports arrive quarterly with perplexed dismay. Gallup’s research demonstrates managers account for at least 70% of variance in team engagement. The evidence is unambiguous: management quality determines whether organisations retain talent or become talent graveyards—places people join for experience but abandon…

As a journalist covering the advertising industry, I knew Piyush Pandey’s reputation long before I met him. Everyone did. His name carried an unseen aura—the man who transformed Indian advertising, whose campaigns became cultural phenomena. When you’re about to interview someone of that stature, you brace for ego, distance, the carefully managed persona that usually accompanies industry legends. Then you’d meet him, and the aura would dissolve into something far more interesting: a man genuinely surprised by his own legend, who spoke about work as though he were still figuring it out, who was closer to people than his reputation…

As a child, I watched a labour union leader address a gathering. “Eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of entertainment or leisure,”his voice echoing through a loudspeaker. In Hindi, it had rhythm: 8 ghanta kaam, 8 ghanta aaram, 8 ghanta manoranjan. It was the foundational principle of organised labour—a demand fought for through strikes and sacrifice, eventually codified into law. That was decades ago. Somewhere between then and now, that principle evaporated. Anna Sebastian Perayil was 26 years old. She worked at EY Pune and died in July 2024, her death attributed to work-related stress. Kerala’s…

Dr. Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who revolutionised gene editing, once said she actively avoided being seen as a “woman scientist.” She wanted to be judged simply as a scientist. Two decades later, her wish seems closer to reality—at least on paper. Today, 77 per cent of leaders across industries recognise that women are as effective as men in leadership roles. The battle for recognition, it would appear, has been won. Yet beneath this veneer of progress lies a more insidious problem: a perception gap so wide it threatens to widen further just as organisations race toward an AI-powered…

Organisations have discovered the perfect business model: demand highly specialised skills from workers whilst accepting zero responsibility for developing them. It’s rather like opening a restaurant that requires diners to cook their own meals but still charges full price. Welcome to the skills-based economy, where companies proclaim the urgent need for capabilities they refuse to create, workers bear sole responsibility for acquiring expertise nobody will teach them, and everyone pretends this represents progress rather than the largest cost-shifting exercise in modern employment history. The training boycott ManpowerGroup’s survey of more than 40,000 employers across 42 countries reveals that temporary workers…

Last week in this column, I wrote about The Great Realignment — the slow but inevitable reshaping of India’s job market from the old IT services model to a more balanced future, anchored by manufacturing and home-grown product innovation. A few days later, the United States added a fresh twist to that story. Washington has hiked fees for the H-1B visa, the single most important ticket for Indian tech workers to enter the American economy. The move has sparked anxiety in India’s IT corridors. For decades, the H-1B has been the symbol of ambition, a golden bridge between India’s engineering…

Cognizant has appointed Thirumala (“Thiru”) Arohi as its new chief learning officer, reporting to Kathy Diaz, chief people officer. The move comes as part of the company’s push to elevate its learning and development capabilities in an era of rapid technological change. Thiru arrives with over 30 years of experience in learning, training and assessment in large technology firms. He spent more than 28 of those years at Infosys, rising to the role of executive vice president and head of education, training & assessment & learning platforms. In that capacity, he was responsible for building scalable learning ecosystems, launching digital…

In the comment section of a recent story on Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one remark cut through the noise: “Those who joined IT enjoyed great salaries and perks, whilst those in manufacturing had to slog. Now that things have changed, why are they cursing the company?” It was part provocation, part social commentary — and it perfectly captured a generational shift in India’s job market. For three decades, IT was the ultimate dream: plush offices, dollar-linked salaries, on-site opportunities abroad. Manufacturing, by contrast, was considered noisy, gritty, and second-best. Engineering graduates aspired to work in Bengaluru’s tech parks, not in…

A recent social media post defending India’s real money gaming (RMG) industry encapsulates the moral dilemma now confronting policymakers. The post, written by an old colleague of mine, argues passionately against the government’s ban, warning of devastating consequences: “We’re talking about an approximate Rs 20,000 crore industry that employs nearly 1 lakh young Indians, has contributed Rs 24,000+ crore in taxes, and invested Rs 8,000 crore in advertising.” But another ex-colleague’s response cuts to the heart of the matter: “I have zero doubt that real money gaming needed to go… Have heard of far too many cases where gambling addiction…

In India’s offices—from Bengaluru’s tech parks to Mumbai’s financial centres—AI is no longer a boardroom pilot; it’s a desktop reality. And not the kind organisations planned for. Employees, frustrated with slow-moving enterprise rollouts, have taken matters into their own hands. They’re using personal accounts of ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools to draft documents, write code, analyse data and automate routine tasks—often without approval, often without guidance, and almost always ahead of the organisation. This is not conjecture; it’s the new normal. A sweeping MIT study on generative AI adoption across enterprises reveals a stark divide: whilst only 40 per…

In 2019, Mrinal Duggal faced a challenge that would test any executive: building Sanofi’s global capability centre in Hyderabad from nothing. Not just another regional outpost, but the pharmaceutical giant’s primary hub for worldwide operations—in a city already crawling with multinational competitors desperate for the same talent. Five years later, her operation houses 3,000 employees across functions spanning drug discovery, commercial operations, and patient services. The transformation represents more than corporate expansion; it’s a case study in how established companies can compete for talent in India’s most contested markets. “Unlike other GCCs, we’re not considered internal service providers. We’re integrated…

A seasoned HR leader with extensive experience across MNCs and Indian conglomerates, Priyank Parakh brings a wealth of expertise in consumer goods, durables, and healthcare. As Director-HR at Haleon, he’s passionate about creating workplaces where people thrive and building cultures that inspire daily excellence. In this candid conversation with Dr. Prajjal Saha, founder and editor of HRKatha, Parakh shares insights on how Haleon is shaping its identity and capabilities following its demerger from GSK two years ago. Q: Haleon spun off from GSK just two years ago – that must have been quite a journey. How did you handle building…