Chief Human Resources Officer / India
The cost and the unfinished work stay visible
- Employment administration and people leadership
- 29 years
- Career begins July 1997
- Company employees
- 860
- Nine laboratories across four cities
- Annual HR function expense
- ₹4.9 crore
- Company payroll separately overseen with finance
Decisions & consequences
01Funding the hours behind required learning
We reviewed the experience of 126 colleagues participating in required learning. Seventy-eight reported completing some of the work in unpaid personal time. A policy described development as supported, but the operating arrangement had not consistently provided the hours. I asked the people team and laboratory managers to examine the actual week in which the work was expected to happen. The issue was not whether learning mattered; it was who supplied the time and which employees could afford to supply it themselves.
We funded ₹38 lakh for paid learning time and cover. Managers had to identify the arrangement alongside the work that still needed to be done, rather than tell participants to fit the programme around an unchanged workload. Technical leaders retained responsibility for the content and assessment. HR's role was to make the employment commitment usable and to examine whether a colleague could participate without quietly absorbing an additional personal cost.
At the repeat review, 113 of the 126 participants had completed the required work within scheduled paid time. Thirteen still needed an arrangement. We kept those cases open rather than describe the programme as fully implemented. Completion of learning hours did not establish professional competence or better diagnostic results, and we did not present it that way. The evidence concerned the paid-time arrangement within the reviewed group.
The decision changed the account we gave management. We could show a funded commitment, an observed implementation result and the remaining work. I learned that a development promise can be uneven even when the same invitation is sent to everyone. Making the hours explicit does not answer every question about access or learning quality, but it removes one source of ambiguity. A credible people account should preserve the thirteen unresolved arrangements rather than let a high completion count make them disappear.
Correcting entry pay without claiming a company-wide answer
We examined ninety-six recent hires in four support grades after questions about the basis of entry offers. Prior salary had influenced those offers, which meant a previous employer's decision could travel into our own pay structure without a clear account of the new job's work. The review found thirty-one people below the revised entry range. I asked the reward team to explain the role requirements and the proposed correction, including the recurring cost and the boundary of the population examined.
We corrected those thirty-one salaries at an annualised cost of ₹42 lakh and stopped using prior salary to set entry offers in the four grades. Finance reviewed the recurring expense, and managers received an explanation of the work and responsibilities behind the range. Staff could ask about their own position through the people team. We did not describe the change as a temporary allowance that might later disappear without explanation.
The review did not establish company-wide pay equity. It covered ninety-six recent hires in four support grades, not all 860 employees or every possible difference in treatment. We also did not claim that a new offer method would remove all judgement or make every pay decision simple. The result was a defined correction and a clearer basis for subsequent offers within the specified scope. Questions outside that scope still needed their own examination.
I learned to resist an attractive but overbroad conclusion. A company can do useful work on one source of inconsistency without announcing that fairness has been settled. The board needs to know which employees were reviewed, why the decision changed and what cost continues into future years. The people affected need an explanation they can understand. Both accounts are weakened if a bounded correction is used to support a much larger claim that the work did not test.
Opening a route outside the manager involved
Our employment-concern process generally began with the immediate manager. That could be appropriate for routine questions, but it created a difficulty when the concern involved that manager's conduct or decision. I asked the people team to create a route outside the immediate reporting line for appropriate employment concerns, with a separate review owner and clear limits on confidentiality. We did not promise that every matter could be kept entirely within one person's knowledge, because fair review can require involving others.
We funded ₹19 lakh for review capacity and support. Staff received an explanation of how to raise a concern, what the route could handle and when a matter belonged in another specialist process. The purpose was to make access less dependent on the person whose decision was being questioned. It was not to bypass professional review, statutory processes or the rights of someone named in a concern. Those boundaries were part of the explanation, not small print added after use.
During the first six months, thirty-four concerns were received. Twenty-one reviews closed, eight remained open and five were redirected to the relevant specialist process. Those categories totalled the thirty-four received. Closure did not mean that every allegation was substantiated, every requested remedy was accepted or every employee was satisfied. We reported the status without treating the number received as proof of either a healthier or a worse culture.
The lesson was that access and resolution are different achievements. Providing another route can make a promise more usable, but its value still depends on the quality, timeliness and fairness of the response. I wanted management to examine the open cases and the reasons for redirection rather than celebrate the existence of a channel. A person should be able to understand the next step, and the company should be able to explain why its response is appropriate without pretending that a case count measures trust on its own.
Creating progression that did not require a management title
Experienced technical colleagues described a narrow choice: remain in their existing grade or compete for a people-management role, even when their strongest contribution lay in specialist work. I asked HR and technical leadership to define a progression route around work the laboratories actually needed. The question was not whether every long-serving employee should receive a new title. It was whether the company could describe advanced specialist responsibilities and recognise them without requiring supervision of a team as the only evidence of advancement.
Twenty-two colleagues entered the review. Technical leaders assessed professional readiness and the work required; HR examined role descriptions, reward and the explanation given to participants. Nine received specialist-grade promotions, eight continued development and five chose to remain in their current role. The promotions added ₹28 lakh to annual pay expense. We treated that as a recurring cost of the chosen structure rather than a one-off programme budget.
The result did not prove that diagnostic outcomes improved, and it did not mean that everyone who continued development had failed at their existing job. The categories described the decisions reached through this review. Technical judgement remained with qualified leaders. HR did not confer professional competence through a grade change or promise that every participant would later be promoted. The responsibilities attached to a specialist role needed to remain real after the announcement.
I learned that a career structure can distort the work if the only recognised path leads away from what a person does well. A specialist route is useful when the organisation can explain the contribution, development and authority behind it. It is less useful if it merely supplies a new label while leaving the same ambiguity about recognition. I would want the board to understand why the structure fits the business and what cost it creates, while leaving individual professional assessments with the people qualified to make them.