A Perfectionist, Adept At Dealing In People’s Functions With Poise

An astute professional specialising in driving organisations from inception to growth, Pradeep Kumar Bonda is known for his expertise in designing HR strategies, promoting an organisation’s effectiveness and enhancing employee engagement. Having spearheaded multiple change management initiatives in partnership with cross-functional teams, Kumar has also led the transformation of the human resource function from a support function to a strategic business partner.

“I have been diligently involved in building a highly engaged culture that has resulted in high retention rates and high engagement scores,” asserts Pradeep Kumar Bonda, Director People Success at Altruista Health.

Some of the key challenges HR has always faced is to demonstrate the returns on HR initiatives and to delineate the intangible component of people. Partnering with business, continuous engagement with employees, leveraging technology to gain efficiencies and a data-driven approach has helped the teams to look at things from a new lens. This helped the team to go to the business with more reliable data and provide better inputs to the business in decision making. This has enabled the teams to be seen as a value creator than facilitators. 

Kumar is of the view that “as a leader, one of the key attributes one should possess is attention to detail. And, sometimes to achieve it, you have to deep-dive into operations. Throughout my career,  along with the strategic view, I have ensured I closely worked with every function in the organization, understood how work gets done, what are the best practices each team follows and how can they improve upon building the next best.” 

This exercise further helped him understand the learning needs of each function, understand the capabilities of mid-level managers, coach leaders on how to set a direction for the teams, help them come up with the right metrics, measure the progress and more than anything, how to provide feedback at Altruista Health.

Emphasising upon what all changes have pandemic brought about in Altruista Health would be “Decision making,” which has always been one of the required attributes for leaders in Altruista Health. The employees are required to be on their toes, quick in making informed decisions because of the dynamism in the business. Hence, this period has only called deeper attention to this aspect holistically.

Further, Kumar firmly believes that “it is high time we move from being a reactive function to prognostic function. According to me, the industry is moving in the right direction. The role of HR has already shifted from being a facilitator to a partner. With the introduction of AI and ML, we will need more HRs who understands the business processes well so that they can take advantage of the technology. This also means that you will see HRs more involved, which is welcoming.”