Harleen Sodhi | Practice Lead - HR| Infosys Ltd. 

Harleen Sodhi lives life obsessively and immerses herself entirely in people and projects. Her strength lies in working through ambiguity unless fog clears on the vision & then she gets on meticulously with making it happen. Real-time improvisations, rush of the chase, and getting the best out of people and having a ball of a time in the process describes her truly at work. 

“I am passionate, proactive, and positive, I live by the mantra live, learn, love, laugh and whatever you do, build for yourself a life less ordinary.”

Leveraging the right levers with people

Grew up reading a lot of novels and would often find myself intrigued by and lost in characters and their life journeys. That made me very perceptive of people’s motivations and drivers. And since most novels, you read as a kid have fairy tale endings. She developed this outlook very early on in life that if one can leverage the right levers with people, one can make a real difference to their lives & hence the World. She promptly took up HR for the simple reason that it had the word human in it. 

Conversations outside the circle 

Sodhi believes that there is a lot one can gain through conversations with people outside of one’s immediate HR circles & for that reason she often finds herself at the intersection of discussions between business or other business enablers & HR at the workplace. 

Learning is the key priority

She insists that learning is the only constant and this has become especially true in current times when the pandemic toppled all of our work and workplaces. 

The one thing I will change in HR

The prescriptiveness to people management that many a time derives validation from HR policies because it’s the written word, is what she would like to change. We should not just allow ourselves to witness the surprises that the human spirit sometimes throws our way but pro-actively strive to be pleasantly surprised by it, as often & as much as possible. Policies can be self-limiting; they need to make room for manoeuvre.

The one thing she will retain in HR

Since times immemorial, HRM has emphasized on putting people at the forefront of organizational narratives. HRMs critical role to orchestrate a fertile workplace culture driven by employee advocacy and the ongoing shift to being a strategic business partner & change agent should continue. 

Vision for HR's future growth

Technology is disrupting our world & HR is no exception to that. A lot of processes & transactions are getting automated by the day. The advent of mobile application based HR systems, on-demand services & platforms, talent analytics, gig economy, sub-contracting, learning technology etc. will call for significant upskilling on the part of HR managers to keep their relevance intact. As technology frees HR’s bandwidth of erstwhile operational tasks, business immersion will be key.