The unanswered question behind the completed form

I started as a personnel coordinator at Yelquni Business Services in Bhubaneswar in May 2000, shortly after completing a postgraduate human-resources programme. I maintained joining records, arranged induction and helped answer routine employee questions. The work was administrative, but its consequences were personal. An unclear start instruction or a missing record could leave somebody uncertain about a decision that mattered to their household. I learnt to distinguish passing a query to another desk from ensuring that the person received an answer. Senior colleagues made employment decisions; my role was to support the process and keep its unfinished parts visible.

In April 2005 I joined Mavqeri Language Technology as a recruitment-operations specialist. The company needed language and technical skills that did not always appear neatly in a conventional CV. I coordinated interviews, work samples and joining arrangements with delivery managers. I saw the value of a practical assessment, but also how easily a request for evidence could become an unreasonable demand on a candidate's time. A process could be identical for everyone and still create different burdens. That experience later informed my review of candidate work samples when I became responsible for the broader people function.

I moved into people partnering in April 2011. I supported delivery teams in Bhubaneswar and Mysuru and led six people colleagues by the end of the appointment. The role placed me alongside managers making decisions about performance, development and working arrangements. I learnt that a manager's confidence was not always supported by a clear account of the employee's contribution. Some people were frequently present in important conversations; others did valuable work that appeared only when it was missing. I wanted performance discussions to examine the evidence without reducing a complex job to a mechanical score. I also learnt to challenge a decision while preserving the manager's responsibility to make and explain it.

In April 2016 I became head of organisational development. The company was adding distributed teams and more varied specialist roles. I led fourteen colleagues working on management capability, performance processes and development. Our task was not simply to publish a common framework. Managers needed to practise conversations, recognise where their evidence was incomplete and understand the commitments created by an agreed working arrangement. I spent more time with delivery leaders, learning why a well-intended people initiative might fail when staffing or customer expectations were left outside the discussion. That made me more cautious about announcing a programme before its operating conditions had been agreed.

I took the CHRO appointment in April 2021. I report to chief executive Anup Maqneli and work closely with localisation-delivery head Bhavna Qelruni. Twenty-six people-function colleagues report through four managers. The company has 1,180 employees, with teams in two principal centres and distributed locations across India. My ₹5.3 crore annual function expenditure is separate from the company's ₹81 crore compensation and benefits expense. I attend board discussions on people matters when invited. I have not held a director appointment or membership of a board committee.

The decisions described here required me to look at processes the company already considered reasonable. A candidate exercise used real client work and could take several unpaid hours. Appraisal comments sometimes treated being nearby or readily available as evidence of contribution. Return arrangements were described as supportive even when the manager had no funded cover for the proposed workload. In each case, I asked for a defined review rather than announce that the whole organisation had failed. We changed the process, made the cost explicit and retained outcomes that did not support a simple success story. Some ratings remained unchanged, and some return plans needed revision.

My leadership has become less concerned with defending a policy's wording and more concerned with the decision it enables. A good process should make it possible to explain why somebody was selected, assessed or supported in a particular way. It should also allow the person affected to raise evidence that changes the conclusion. I do not expect every employee and manager to agree with every outcome. I do expect us to distinguish disagreement from a missing explanation and to correct our own contribution when the process has encouraged the wrong assumption. The next stage of the people function is to make that discipline ordinary enough that it does not depend on a complaint reaching my desk before we notice it.

Open to Board appointments · Executive opportunities

Languages / English · Odia · Hindi