Author: Radhika Sharma | HRKatha

For decades, India’s talent map has been drawn around a handful of metropolitan cities. Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad have traditionally been the preferred destinations for organisations looking to hire skilled professionals, build leadership pipelines and access specialised capabilities. But that map is gradually changing. As digital access improves, educational institutions expand their reach and businesses deepen their presence across the country, the talent conversation is moving beyond familiar urban centres. Organisations are increasingly recognising that capable professionals are not necessarily concentrated in the cities where corporate offices are located. Tier-II and Tier-III cities are emerging as important talent markets,…

Your first job comes with an offer letter, an induction session and, if you are lucky, a colleague who tells you where to find the best chai. What it rarely comes with is a guide to the things that actually matter: how to disagree with your manager, when to speak up in a meeting, why being good at your job does not automatically earn a promotion, or how to respond when an assignment takes you somewhere you never intended to go. These lessons tend to arrive uninvited, sometimes disguised as a disappointing appraisal, an uncomfortable conversation or a decision that…

HRKatha’s Case-in-Point presents real-world HR dilemmas and invites leaders to weigh competing business and ethical choices. Company: Orion Manufacturing (fictitious), a listed industrial conglomerate with 18,000 employees, operating across heavy engineering, infrastructure components and industrial automation in India and South-East Asia. Background Three years ago, the Board of Orion Manufacturing identified Vikram Nair, the company’s chief operating officer, as the successor to its outgoing CEO. The decision was communicated directly. Vikram was told he was next in line and given expanded responsibilities to prepare for the position. He subsequently turned down two significant external offers, choosing to remain with Orion…

Bajaj Finserv has elevated Amit Sharma to senior head–HR, learning and development (L&D) and administration, effective October 2026. In his new role, he will head these functions for the Microfinance strategic business unit (SBU) of Bajaj Finance. Sharma brings over 20 years of experience in human resources, talent management, learning and development, strategic HR planning, employee engagement and business partnering. Before his elevation, Sharma served as head-HR and L&D at Bajaj Finserv from January 2024 to October 2026, overseeing HR, learning and development, and administration for the Microfinance SBU. Prior to this, he was vice president – human resources at…

A manufacturing plant can expand its capacity faster than an organisation can develop the people needed to run it. New production lines can be commissioned, technology can be installed and operations can be scaled up. Building the technical expertise and leadership capability to support that growth is a different challenge, particularly when specialised talent is already in short supply. Saatvik Green Energy is confronting these questions as it expands beyond its established Ambala operations into a new greenfield facility in Odisha and develops capabilities in cell manufacturing alongside module production. For Arindam Chakraborty, CHRO at Saatvik Green Energy, the answer…

A company can have respectable gender diversity numbers and still have a leadership problem. Women may be well represented among new recruits, yet remain scarce in technology, sales and roles carrying profit-and-loss responsibility. The numbers at the entrance look encouraging. Further up the organisation, the picture can be quite different. TELUS Digital, which employs around 1800 people in India across its offices in Noida, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Mumbai, is looking more closely at that difference. Rather than relying on overall representation, it is examining where women work, how they progress and whether they receive the assignments that prepare employees for…

There is always that one employee who volunteers for the extra assignment, stays back to get a presentation just right or seems to find the energy to go beyond what the job demands. Organisations often celebrate such employees as examples of passion and commitment. But what happens when their exceptional effort becomes the standard against which everyone else is measured? Passion can inspire people to take ownership, experiment and deliver work they are proud of. Yet workplaces do not always distinguish between employees who genuinely enjoy going beyond their roles and those who feel compelled to demonstrate enthusiasm to remain…

HRKatha’s Case-in-Point presents real-world HR dilemmas and invites leaders to weigh competing business and ethical choices. Company: Forge & Allied Manufacturing (fictitious), a mid-sized engineering and manufacturing company with 3,800 employees, producing precision components and assemblies for the automotive, heavy machinery and industrial equipment sectors. Background The results of Forge & Allied Manufacturing’s annual engagement survey arrived three weeks ago. Across most of the organisation, scores were stable. One unit stood out. Plant 4, which handles the company’s most complex machining operations, recorded the lowest engagement scores in the organisation. In the confidential comments, employees described their plant manager, Rakesh…

Organisations have become increasingly fluent in the language of culture, inclusion and psychological safety. Whether that language has changed how people experience their workplaces is a different question. Employees are encouraged to speak up, yet hierarchical behaviour persists. Companies celebrate diversity, yet leadership teams often emerge from remarkably similar backgrounds. And when good people leave, the explanation frequently returns to compensation rather than the quality of management. Prabir Jha has spent more than three decades in people leadership across Tata Motors, Reliance Industries, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories and Cipla before moving into advisory work. That experience has left him sceptical of…

As organisations embrace continuous feedback, HR leaders explain why annual reviews still matter and where traditional appraisal cycles fall short. The annual performance review has long been a fixture of corporate life. Every year, employees wait to find out how they have performed, managers assess achievements and shortcomings, and conversations about ratings, increments and promotions take centre stage. But when feedback arrives only once a year, the exercise can feel less like an assessment of performance and more like a verdict on the preceding twelve months. As organisations increasingly adopt regular check-ins and continuous feedback, the question is whether the…

Ask employees what gets them through a long working day and the answers rarely involve appraisals or the next long weekend. More likely, it is the morning chai with a colleague before opening the laptop, the lunch break that turns into an impromptu gossip session or that one person who knows exactly what to say when a meeting has gone badly wrong. These moments seldom feature in presentations on employee engagement. They are too ordinary to be announced as initiatives and too spontaneous to be reliably organised. Yet they often become the stories employees remember long after the details of…

Company: Halcroft Partners (fictitious), a global management consulting firm with 4,200 employees, advising clients across financial services, infrastructure and the public sector in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.  Background Sunita Nair and Rohit Desai had both been with Halcroft Partners for seven years. Both were principal consultants, with strong performance records, comparable client portfolios and similar internal ratings across the previous three review cycles. When a senior director position opened in the firm’s infrastructure practice, both were shortlisted. The selection process lasted six weeks. A panel comprising the practice head, two senior partners and an external facilitator assessed both…

Gokaldas Exports operates in a business where performance depends on the coordination of people across production, quality, logistics and corporate functions. In garment manufacturing, the contribution of one employee is often closely connected to the work of several others. That makes the way organisations assess, reward and develop people particularly consequential. For Amit Sharma, CHRO at Gokaldas Exports, this raises questions about how performance itself should be understood. Should variable pay reward individual achievement or collective results? Should strong performers automatically be considered for management roles? And what happens when capable employees cannot demonstrate their abilities because the workplace has…

Collecting employee feedback has become relatively easy. The more difficult question is what happens after somebody speaks up. At IndiaFirst Life, an AI-enabled engagement system follows up with employees 15 days after they raise a workplace concern, asking whether the issue has been resolved. The mechanism introduces an element of accountability into a process that can otherwise end once feedback has been collected. “An AI system can surface concerns across a dispersed workforce, identify patterns in employee sentiment and make information accessible to leaders,” says Sunder Natarajan, chief human resources officer. “It cannot, by itself, ensure that a manager intervenes,…

Think about it. Employees work on projects that change every few months, yet their performance is often assessed once a year. Organisations encourage experimentation, yet reward employees primarily for meeting predetermined targets. Technology promises increasingly personalised employee experiences, yet the human connection that makes workplaces meaningful can sometimes get lost in the pursuit of efficiency. The disconnect is becoming difficult to ignore. While employee expectations have evolved towards greater flexibility, transparency, purpose and meaningful feedback, many HR practices continue to operate on assumptions that made sense in a different workplace. So which HR practice needs the most urgent rethink? Is…

There are workplace perks that arrive with a budget, a vendor and a launch email. Then there are the ones employees remember long after the announcement has disappeared from their inbox. A manager who says, “Go home, we will deal with this tomorrow.” The freedom to attend to something urgent without explaining every personal detail. Being trusted to manage one’s time without having to demonstrate constant availability. These gestures rarely feature in a benefits brochure. Some are so ordinary that employees might reasonably wonder why they should be considered perks at all. Yet in workplaces where every absence needs justification…

For employees working across branches and field roles, the organisation can often feel less like an institution and more like the person they report to every day. That gives the immediate manager enormous influence over performance, engagement and, ultimately, whether people stay. At Liberty General Insurance, Puja Agarwal argues that this changes how manager performance itself should be judged. Strong numbers cannot be viewed in isolation from the people producing them. In conversation with HRKatha, the president-HR explains why sustainable performance must include team stability, why exit interviews capture the end of the attrition story rather than its beginning, and…

Hiring in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities is often discussed through the economics of talent: different salary markets, lower operating costs and access to pools of people beyond the metros. Godrej Capital is approaching the question from the other end. “If you have to expand in India, you’ve got to go deeper in the geography, especially if you have products that talk to that customer. You’ll have to go to where the customer is,” says Bhavya Misra, chief human resources officer. For a lending business, proximity to the customer has implications beyond where a branch is located. Loan behaviour, local economic…

A people strategy can look healthy on paper: attrition is under control, engagement scores are up, learning hours are rising and internal mobility is moving in the right direction. But numbers tell HR what is happening, not why it matters. They do not always reveal whether a people strategy is actually changing how employees think, behave and work. The real test, therefore, may lie outside the dashboard: in the conversations managers have, the talent organisations retain and develop, the decisions leaders make and whether employees begin to own initiatives that once belonged to HR. So what should HR leaders look…

Pramerica Life Insurance operates in a sector where the frontline workforce is large, geographically dispersed and under constant sales pressure. Attrition is a structural feature of the industry rather than an anomaly. The more useful question for HR, therefore, is not simply why people leave, but when the conditions that eventually lead to an exit first begin to emerge. Sharad K. Sharma has been working on that question as CHRO & Chief Ethics Officer. In conversation with HRKatha, he explains why the first 90 days matter disproportionately in frontline retention, why every significant people decision at Pramerica Life is expected…

A hospital has one organisation chart. It does not have one workforce. At Paras Health, which operates eight hospitals and employs more than 2,800 people, the gap between those two things is where the HR challenge begins. Doctors, nurses, technicians, patient-facing teams, corporate employees and contracted workers operate in different environments, carry different responsibilities and arrive with different expectations. A common HR architecture may be necessary across them. A common employee experience is considerably harder to define. Balkishan Sharma, chief human resources officer, began not with a new programme but with what he describes as a reset of the basics.…

Company: Apex Digital (fictitious), a mid-sized technology company with 1,600 employees, building SaaS products and digital solutions for enterprise clients across banking, retail and healthcare. Background Riya Kapoor has been on the product team at Apex Digital for three years. By most internal measures, she is one of the strongest individual contributors in the function. Her manager has said so. Her performance reviews have said so. And when Apex needed someone to anchor its most critical client relationship, a flagship account that contributes significantly to the company’s revenue, Riya was the person it trusted. That trust has now become a…

There is an obvious problem with a health insurance company that does not take its employees’ health seriously. The gap between what the business sells and how it treats its own people is the kind of contradiction employees notice quickly. For ManipalCigna Health Insurance, that makes wellbeing more than another item on the HR agenda. There is an uncomfortable expectation of consistency built into the business itself. “Employee wellbeing has evolved far beyond the traditional conversation around benefits,” says Richa Chatterjee, chief human resources officer. “People do not separate their health, growth, sense of belonging and purpose at work; they…

There was a time when an employee’s professional identity was largely confined to the organisation they worked for. Today, that boundary is far less defined. A LinkedIn post, an industry comment, a panel appearance or even a personal take on a workplace trend can travel far beyond an employee’s immediate professional circle. As employees increasingly build visibility and credibility in their own names, organisations are finding themselves navigating a new question: should they actively encourage employees to build personal brands, or does greater visibility also create greater risk? For HR leaders, the answer appears to lie somewhere between freedom and…

Some workplace phrases have become so embedded in office life that nobody questions them anymore. Someone says, “Let’s take this offline,” and a conversation quietly disappears. A colleague asks for a “quick sync” and forty-five minutes evaporate. A manager says “touch base” and nobody is quite sure whether that means Tuesday or never. The peculiar achievement of corporate language is how productive it can sound while committing to almost nothing. Three HR leaders nominate the phrases they would cheerfully retire, and make the case for saying what we actually mean. “Give me two minutes” Sunil Ranjhan, CHRO, Dixon Technologies The…

Company: Synapse Technologies (fictitious), a mid-sized IT services and product engineering firm with 2,200 employees, delivering software development, cloud solutions and digital transformation services to enterprise clients across the US, UK and India. Background Synapse Technologies has unusually low attrition for a company of its size. The CEO, Vikram Anand, believes he knows one reason why. Over the past four years, Vikram has deliberately built what he describes as a culture of genuine connection. Monthly team outings. Quarterly off-site retreats. After-hours celebrations for project completions, client wins and personal milestones. Participation has never been formally mandatory. But the expectation is…