The employment decision behind the record

I completed a commerce degree in May 1997 and started work at Nelavrita Service Associates in Tirunelveli the following month. The company provided workplace administration and support services. My first assignment was payroll preparation under a supervisor, with responsibility for checking attendance inputs and explaining differences before approval. I learnt that an accurate calculation could still be based on an unclear instruction. An employee asking why an allowance had changed needed more than a description of the arithmetic. Somebody had to identify the employment decision behind the entry and take responsibility for explaining it.

By the time I moved to Kerumati Housing Finance in April 2003, I wanted to work closer to those decisions. I joined as a people operations officer supporting a small branch network. The company was growing, and local managers often solved immediate staffing problems informally. Some arrangements worked well; others survived long after the original absence or vacancy had ended. I began recording the start, purpose and review date of temporary duties. It was a modest administrative change, but it gave employees and managers a shared reference when their understanding of an assignment diverged.

My promotion to regional HR manager in April 2008 brought responsibility for eight branches. Travel made the differences between locations impossible to ignore. A recruitment promise that sounded reasonable at headquarters might be difficult to deliver in a branch with one experienced supervisor and a long journey between customer visits. I spent time with new joiners after their first month, not only with managers at the end of a probation review. Their accounts helped us distinguish a skill gap from a mismatch between the advertised job and the work actually assigned. I could not fix every disagreement, but I could improve the evidence behind the response.

In April 2014 I became head of workforce and employee relations. I now had to connect local issues with organisation design, budgets and the expectations of senior leaders. I found that our internal promotion process depended too heavily on a manager choosing to nominate an employee. Managers had legitimate concerns about losing capable people, but those concerns were being settled through silence rather than through a visible staffing decision. I began discussing release capacity alongside succession, asking what a branch would need to let somebody move. That experience later shaped the more open assessment process I introduced as CHRO.

I took the chief human resources officer role in April 2020. The immediate period required attention to employee communication, continuity and the practical conditions in which people could work. As the organisation settled into a more stable rhythm, I commissioned a review of acting responsibilities. Eighteen employees had been carrying additional branch duties beyond the intended period. The resulting pay adjustments cost ₹22 lakh. We did not call the entire exercise a legal settlement or assume that one policy interpretation resolved every case. Each assignment was reviewed with the relevant managers, finance and appropriate advice, and employees received a clear account of the company's decision.

The review changed how I work with the chief executive. I now ask for the cost of an employment choice to be visible before we celebrate its flexibility. An acting arrangement can help somebody develop, but it can also conceal a vacancy the organisation has chosen not to fund. An internal move can reward ability while leaving a branch exposed. I want those consequences discussed together. My role is not to remove all managerial discretion. It is to make the discretion accountable to a decision that can be explained consistently and reconsidered when the facts change.

Today our company has 32 branches, 460 employees and eighteen people-function colleagues. I report to the chief executive and present workforce matters to the board's nomination and remuneration committee by invitation. I have no statutory director appointment. My own function budget is ₹3.8 crore for FY2026–27; the enterprise employee-cost plan is a separate figure agreed with finance. I am known for returning a broad culture claim to a particular employment decision: who was asked to do what, with which authority, for how long and on what terms. A future role should give me the opportunity to improve those decisions at scale while remaining close enough to hear when the organisation's explanation does not match an employee's experience.

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