Meet the leaders shaping the new rewards equation at TRWC 2026

Total Rewards leaders are being asked to solve several competing problems at once. They must retain critical talent without continually increasing fixed costs, offer employees greater choice without weakening equity, improve transparency without creating unnecessary complexity, and support high performance without steadily depleting workforce energy.

These are not compensation questions alone. They require organisations to connect economic realities, business priorities, performance systems, employee expectations and wellbeing within one coherent rewards strategy.

People Matters is bringing these conversations together at the Total Rewards & Wellbeing Conference 2026, taking place on 18 November at The Leela Ambience, Gurugram. Built around the theme “Orchestrating Performance in a Choice-Driven Workforce,” the conference is organised across four strategic pillars: Orchestrating Impact, Orchestrating Choice, Orchestrating Trust and Orchestrating Energy.

The speaker line-up reflects the range of perspectives required to address this agenda. Here are five leaders whose experience adds economic, organisational and practitioner depth to the conference.

Duvvuri Subbarao: Connecting economic signals with people decisions

Former Governor, Reserve Bank of India

Pay, benefits and workforce investments do not operate separately from the economy. Inflation changes the purchasing power of salaries. Interest rates affect household confidence and business investment. Currency movements, economic growth and changing consumption patterns influence talent demand, workforce costs and salary budgets.

Duvvuri Subbarao is addressing this connection through the conference session “Economic Intelligence for People Decisions.” The conversation is designed to help CHROs, CFOs and Total Rewards leaders interpret the economic forces influencing pay, benefits and talent investments.

Subbarao served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2008 to 2013 and previously held positions including Finance Secretary to the Government of India and Secretary to the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council.

His experience gives the audience a rare opportunity to examine people costs through a macroeconomic lens. The practical value lies in understanding which signals represent short-term volatility, which indicate structural change and how organisations can balance affordability, competitiveness and long-term workforce investment.

Preeti Gupta: Designing rewards for the organisation being built

Founder, Purpple Design

Rewards systems often carry assumptions inherited from an earlier stage of the organisation. As businesses scale, enter new markets or prepare for major transitions, those systems may cease to reflect their workforce, strategy or future direction.

Preeti Gupta brings a people and organisation-design perspective to this challenge. Purpple Design operates across workforce strategy, organisation design, executive remuneration, rewards, ESOPs and long-term incentives. Gupta also brings extensive experience from senior HR roles, including her earlier tenure as Group Executive President–Group HR at the Aditya Birla Group.

Her experience offers the audience a valuable lens on intentional rewards design: building systems around an organisation’s specific context rather than adopting standard market practices.

This is particularly relevant to the conference pillars of Choice and Trust. Organisations need to offer rewards that reflect different career stages and employee priorities while maintaining fairness, clarity and a common employee proposition. Gupta’s background places her close to the strategic and design questions involved in achieving that balance.

Gaurav Chopra: Balancing global consistency with local relevance

Head of Global Rewards, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories

Global rewards leaders operate across different labour markets, regulatory environments, talent segments and employee expectations. The challenge is to create a coherent rewards philosophy without assuming that identical practices will work equally well everywhere.

As Head of Global Rewards at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Gaurav Chopra brings experience from the centre of this tension. His role gives him a direct vantage point on how rewards decisions connect with enterprise priorities across markets.

For the TRWC audience, that experience adds value to questions around governance, consistency and flexibility. What should be standardised across the organisation? Where is local differentiation necessary? How can data support better decisions while keeping those decisions understandable and accountable?

These questions connect closely with Orchestrating Trust. A global rewards system must be disciplined enough to maintain equity and credibility, but flexible enough to respond to different skills, markets and workforce needs.

Debashish Majumdar: Bringing performance and rewards into one system

Group Head–Performance & Rewards, RPG Group

Performance management, incentives and recognition frequently operate on different timelines. Goals may encourage collaboration and long-term capability building, while rewards continue to favour short-term or individual results. Employees are then left to interpret competing signals about what the organisation genuinely values.

Debashish Majumdar’s role brings performance and rewards into the same frame. As Group Head–Performance & Rewards at RPG Group, his experience is especially relevant to organisations seeking a clearer connection between contribution, recognition and business value.

His participation adds a practitioner’s lens to Orchestrating Impact, the TRWC pillar focused on engineering performance through pay-for-impact.

For the audience, the value lies in examining how goals, differentiated pay and recognition can reinforce one another. Within a diversified group, the conversation also becomes more complex: an enterprise may need a common rewards philosophy while individual businesses respond to different margins, talent markets and growth cycles.

Majumdar’s experience places him close to these implementation questions—where rewards strategy must move from design intent to decisions that managers and employees can understand.

Ananta Bhatia: Making choice and equity work at enterprise scale

Head–Total Rewards, Nestle

Offering employees greater choice sounds straightforward until it must be implemented across a large and varied workforce.

Different employee groups may value healthcare, financial security, flexibility, career development or retirement support differently. Organisations must respond to this diversity without creating uncontrolled costs, fragmented programmes or unequal access.

As Head–Total Rewards at Nestlé, Ananta Bhatia brings the perspective of managing Total Rewards within a complex enterprise environment. Her participation is confirmed in the TRWC 2026 speaker line-up.

Her experience offers the audience a relevant lens on the relationship between scale, employee choice and consistency. It also connects the conference pillars of Choice, Trust and Energy.

The value is in understanding how different elements of the employee proposition—pay, benefits, healthcare, financial wellbeing and career opportunity—can remain connected. Employees experience these elements together, even when organisations manage them through separate policies and teams.

Different vantage points, one rewards challenge

These five leaders approach Total Rewards from different positions: macroeconomics, organisation design, global rewards, performance systems and enterprise-scale implementation.

Together, their experience reflects the central idea behind TRWC 2026: rewards cannot operate as a collection of disconnected programmes. Pay must communicate what the organisation values. Choice must remain compatible with fairness. Transparency must strengthen credibility. Wellbeing must support sustained performance.

More such insights are coming together across the TRWC pillars of Orchestrating Impact, Orchestrating Choice, Orchestrating Trust and Orchestrating Energy. Through economist perspectives, practitioner-led discussions, deep-dive tracks and masterclasses, the conference is creating space for leaders to examine what rewards systems must achieve for both people and the business.

Join the room on 18 November 2026 at The Leela Ambience, Gurugram. Explore TRWC 2026 and register now.