Author: Radhika Sharma | HRKatha

Company: VelocityTech (fictitious), a mid-sized software product company with 800 employees, building enterprise solutions across supply chain, logistics and workforce management. Background For almost a year, Karan Nair had been doing something his team knew nothing about. Karan, a senior engineering manager at VelocityTech, was well-liked and widely regarded as approachable. People confided in him. They spoke about workload, frustrations with leadership and personal pressures affecting their performance. They trusted him because he listened. What they did not know was that Karan regularly passed those conversations to Meera Pillai, the CHRO. Not through formal reports, but in informal messages and…

Hero Housing Finance operates in a sector where most employees serve customers directly. That changes the nature of the HR challenge. The debate is not about where work happens but about how effectively it gets done. In a fast-growing, tightly regulated NBFC, HR cannot afford to remain a process function. It has to become a business function that happens to work through people. Paramjit Singh Nayyar has been driving that shift as CHRO. In conversation with HRKatha, he explains why stay interviews reveal far more than exit interviews, why the three HR metrics that matter to his board are all…

The modern workplace has become more measurable than ever. With digital tools capable of tracking everything from keystrokes and screen time to login hours, meeting attendance and mouse movement, organisations now have unprecedented visibility into how employees spend their workdays. For some leaders, these tools promise greater accountability and sharper performance management. For others, they signal a workplace where employees are monitored more than they are trusted. The debate has only intensified as hybrid and remote work become permanent realities. While businesses understandably want assurance that work is getting done, many employees argue that productivity cannot be reduced to activity…

Every workplace has its unofficial career rules. Never accept a pay cut. Stay in your lane. The longer the hours, the stronger the commitment. These ideas pass quietly from experienced colleagues to new joiners, repeated often enough that they begin to sound like facts rather than opinions. Most contain a grain of truth. That is precisely what makes them persuasive. Advice that works in one situation slowly hardens into a rule for every situation, until people stop asking whether it still applies. Careers, however, are rarely built by following formulas unquestioningly. Two HR leaders reflect on the pieces of conventional…

Company: Meridian Analytics (fictitious), a mid-sized analytics and management consultancy with 1,400 employees, delivering data-driven strategy, business intelligence and digital transformation services to enterprise clients across banking, retail and infrastructure. Background Priya Rajan has been a junior analyst at Meridian for two years. By her manager’s assessment, she is one of the stronger performers in her cohort. Her client feedback is consistently positive. She has never raised a concern with HR. That changed three weeks ago. During a routine task, Priya was given access to a shared drive to retrieve a client report. The folder also contained a salary summary…

Jindal Steel has appointed Sukhjit S. Pasricha as president & head – human resources, strengthening its leadership team as the company continues to advance its growth and manufacturing ambitions. Pasricha brings over 30 years of experience in corporate and business HR across the manufacturing, aviation, telecom, and BFSI sectors. His expertise spans HR strategy, organisational capability, HR transformation, talent management, change management, HR technology, productivity improvement, and business partnering across both B2B and B2C organisations. Prior to joining Jindal Steel, Pasricha served as group chief human resources officer at IndiGo for nearly four years. During his second stint with the…

In technology services, talent is the product. Birlasoft delivers digital transformation, cloud services and enterprise technology to clients across industries, making the quality of its people a commercial differentiator rather than a support function concern. Skills are evolving faster than traditional development cycles, AI is reshaping how software is built and services are delivered, and experienced talent remains fiercely contested. In that environment, decisions about whether to build, buy or borrow capability are business decisions as much as HR decisions. Priti Kataria led people strategy at Birlasoft through that environment. In conversation with HRKatha, she explains why the build-or-buy question…

Corporate AI strategies often begin the same way. Buy the tools. Train employees. Measure adoption. Hope productivity follows. Newgen Software believes the sequence is backwards. “We don’t measure AI success by the number of employees trained,” says Kashish Kapoor, the company’s global chief human resources officer. “We measure it by how naturally AI becomes part of everyday work.” The distinction is important. Teaching employees how to use AI is relatively easy. Redesigning work so that people and AI genuinely complement one another is much harder. It requires organisations to rethink hiring, learning, performance management and leadership together rather than treating…

The hiring conversation has shifted dramatically over the past few years. Once, technical expertise was the gold standard, proof that a candidate could step in and deliver from day one. Today, that assumption is being challenged. AI is transforming jobs, industries are evolving at breakneck speed and the skills employees possess today may become outdated much sooner than expected. As organisations navigate this changing landscape, adaptability has emerged as one of the most sought-after qualities. Recruiters increasingly value curiosity, learning agility and the willingness to embrace change. Yet the question remains: can the ability to learn outweigh the ability to…

The first few weeks in a new job follow a familiar script. You arrive determined to prove yourself. You say yes to every request, take pages of notes, and reassure yourself that experience will carry you through. Then the small surprises begin. The acronyms nobody explains. Meetings where everyone seems to know when to speak and when to stay silent. Decisions that appear to happen somewhere long before the meeting where they are officially announced. Most people assume they are being hired to learn a role. In reality, they are also learning an organisation. And organisations, unlike job descriptions, do…

Merck Life Science sits at the intersection of science, technology and commerce, supplying the tools, materials and services that enable drug discovery, bioprocessing and laboratory research across the global life sciences industry. In India, that means managing a workforce that spans researchers, manufacturing specialists, sales professionals and shared services teams, all operating in a highly regulated environment where the cost of getting things wrong is measured not just in revenue but in scientific credibility. Kundan Kumar leads HR across that complexity. In conversation with HRKatha, he explains why building, buying and partnering are not alternatives but simultaneous requirements, why gender…

India’s renewable energy ambitions are measured in gigawatts. The country wants 500GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030, and investment in solar parks, wind farms and transmission infrastructure continues to accelerate. What receives far less attention is the workforce required to build all of it. Green Power International (GPI), an engineering, procurement and construction company working across renewable energy and oil and gas projects, has encountered that constraint directly. “Getting skilled talent is becoming more challenging because the energy sector is a very niche segment,” says Sandeep Das, the company’s global HR leader. The shortage is structural rather than cyclical.…

Company: Brightfield Consumer Goods (fictitious), a mid-sized FMCG company with 1,800 employees, known for its portfolio of packaged foods and beverages sold across modern and general trade in India. Background: The sales team at Brightfield had just beaten their quarterly target by 23 per cent, delivering the strongest regional sales performance the company had seen in three years. Their numbers had come in ahead of a key competitor in three districts where Brightfield had steadily lost market share over the previous year. Rohan Desai, the team lead, decided they deserved a proper celebration. He booked a table at a popular bar in…

DCB Bank is a mid-sized private sector bank competing for talent against larger banks, fintechs and technology firms. It cannot rely on brand recognition alone. It has to offer careers that grow, leaders who remain accessible and development pathways employees believe in. Ashu Sawhney has been shaping that experience as Head-HR. In conversation with HRKatha, she explains why attrition in banking is rarely about salary alone, why internal mobility is one of the strongest signals an organisation can send to its workforce, and why the immediate supervisor still shapes more of an employee’s experience than any policy or programme. What…

Hospitality attrition typically ranges between 35 and 70 per cent a year. Radisson Hotel Group reports 11 per cent. That gap demands an explanation. The company’s answer is learning. Not training in the conventional sense of compliance modules, safety certifications or service scripts, but a structured development ecosystem designed to make careers visibly progress within the organisation. In 2025, 40 per cent of vacancies were filled internally. Employees completed more than one million courses, accounting for 8.5 million learning hours. Sixty-five per cent of digital skill badges earned were shared publicly on professional platforms. “Our philosophy is rooted in one…

The National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF) has appointed Arun Krishnamurthy as its chief human resources officer (CHRO), strengthening its leadership team as the sovereign-backed investment platform enters its next phase of growth. In his new role, Krishnamurthy will lead NIIF’s people strategy, with responsibility for talent management, leadership development, organisational capability, culture, and building a future-ready workforce to support the institution’s long-term investment agenda. Krishnamurthy brings more than 25 years of global HR leadership experience across financial services, telecommunications, FMCG, IT, and technology. His expertise spans strategic HR, organisational transformation, business partnering, talent management, succession planning, leadership development, HR…

Technology is no longer HR’s competitive advantage. In 2026, most organisations will have access to AI, predictive analytics and digital HR platforms. What will distinguish them is how intelligently they use those tools. Will AI become another mechanism to monitor employees, or will it free managers to become better coaches? Will predictive analytics replace judgement, or strengthen it? Will compliance create bureaucracy, or enable faster decisions? And as people become the biggest determinant of business performance, will HR finally move beyond being a support function to become a genuine business leader? For Shailesh Singh, former, Chief People Officer at Axis…

Leadership advice has a habit of accumulating. Read another book. Learn another framework. Build another capability. The assumption is simple: better leaders are built by adding more. Yet ask experienced leaders what changed them most, and many point to something very different. Not a new skill they acquired, but an old habit they left behind. Sometimes growth begins not by learning something new, but by letting go of something that no longer serves you. Defending every decision. Assuming the loudest voice has the best idea. Believing long hours equal commitment. Or thinking a leader must always have the answers. For…

Company: Zenith Bank (fictitious), a private sector bank with 18,000 employees across retail, corporate and SME banking. Background During Zenith Bank’s annual performance review, HR noticed something unusual. Most regions showed the expected spread of ratings. A handful of top performers. A large middle. A few employees needing improvement. Then came Arvind Kapoor’s region. Arvind, the Regional Head for the West, is one of the bank’s strongest business leaders. His business numbers are consistently among the best. Attrition is low. People want to work for him. Yet, for the third consecutive year, nearly 90 per cent of his team had…

IIFL Finance is a branch-led lending business operating at scale across India, with a workforce that is largely frontline, customer-facing and office-based. That last detail matters more than it first appears. At a time when hybrid work dominates workplace conversations, IIFL Finance operates in a different reality. Customers walk into branches, employees handle gold, and human interaction is not a differentiator, it is the business itself. The people challenges in that environment are distinct, and often overlooked in broader conversations about the future of work. As President and CHRO, Preeti Kannan has spent the past few years navigating that reality.…

The language of work is changing. For decades, organisations focused on employability: whether candidates could do the job when they were hired. In 2026, the defining question is becoming deployability: how quickly people can create value in roles that themselves keep changing. The shift is subtle in wording but profound in implication. It reflects a reality that many organisations are only beginning to acknowledge. Work has evolved faster than hiring systems, development frameworks and even educational models. Rajorshi Ganguli, President & Global HR Head at Alkem Laboratories and author of Winning with Gen Z, believes organisations that recognise this shift…

The modern workplace has become fluent in the language of exits. First came the Great Resignation, followed by quiet quitting, rage applying, bare minimum Mondays and career cushioning. Each trend attempted to explain why employees disengage before they leave. Now something more unsettling is surfacing: not employees quietly walking away, but employees deliberately ensuring their departure leaves a scar. Revenge quitting is not simply resigning after a bad experience. It is leaving with the intention to disrupt: delaying knowledge transfer, withholding critical information, damaging client relationships, attacking employers publicly, deleting files, or creating chaos during the notice period. Social media…

For years, the return-to-office debate has been framed as a tug of war between employers and employees. One side argues that people collaborate better when they work together physically. The other believes productivity has little to do with desks, office buildings or badge swipes. As organisations continue revisiting attendance policies, the conversation has become far more nuanced. Behind every return-to-office mandate lies a different organisational reality. For some, it is about strengthening culture and collaboration. For others, it reflects operational realities that simply cannot be managed remotely. And then there are leaders who question whether mandates are necessary at all,…

Recall your first day at work? In all likelihood, you may not remember what the induction deck looked like or which HR policy was explained first. However, you probably remember the colleague who walked you to the cafeteria, the team that insisted you join them for lunch, or the manager who made sure you didn’t spend your first day eating alone. Workplaces have changed dramatically. Offices have become hybrid, meetings have moved to screens, and conversations often happen through emojis rather than across desks. Yet, somehow, it isn’t the technology or policies that people reminisce about years later. It’s the…

Company: Urban Logistics, a supply chain company (fictitious) Background An anonymous email addressed to HR alleges that a senior manager is having an affair with a direct report, creating favouritism and an uncomfortable work environment. No name is provided for the direct report. The manager denies everything. There is no corroborating evidence. The dilemma Should HR investigate an anonymous, unverified complaint that could be malicious gossip — risking reputational damage to the manager? Or should it be dismissed as hearsay, potentially ignoring a real and ongoing workplace issue? What’s really at stake Whether anonymous complaints are credible enough to act on…

As manufacturing undergoes rapid transformation driven by automation, digitalisation, AI and evolving workforce expectations, organisations are being challenged to rethink how they attract, develop and retain talent. For industrial companies, the conversation is no longer limited to technology adoption; it is equally about building future-ready talent, strengthening leadership pipelines, fostering continuous learning and maintaining strong employee relations in an increasingly dynamic environment. In this edition of HR Perspectives, Sushil Baveja, CHRO, Jindal Stainless, speaks on the changing talent landscape in manufacturing, the importance of nurturing leaders from within, creating cultures where employees feel safe to speak up, and why learning…