Pune · since 2019
Culture work in India has a delivery problem, not an idea problem.
Everybody already knows what good management looks like. Almost nobody can describe what a manager in Hinjewadi should do differently on Monday morning. That gap is the entire job, and it is the only thing we work on.
The standard sequence is familiar enough to recite. A 42-question engagement survey goes out in October. Response rate lands somewhere near 71 per cent. In November a consultant presents a deck with green, amber and red boxes, and a team lead learns that his group scored 3.4 out of 5 on psychological safety. He is asked to build an action plan. He builds one, because he was asked to. Nothing in his week changes. Next October the same survey goes out and the number moves by 0.2, which is inside the noise, and everyone agrees the culture is improving.
We spent years producing that sequence for other firms before starting Humans Society in 2019. We know exactly how it gets made and how little of it survives contact with a Tuesday. So the studio was built to make something else: fewer instruments, more direct contact, and a written record of decisions that a manager can actually be held to.
Concretely, that means a consultant takes one client at a time. We sit in your one-on-ones. We read your last two appraisal cycles line by line, including the ratings that got overturned and the comment boxes people left empty. We compare what your HRMS records against what people say when the recording stops. We call the eleven people who resigned in the last six months, because they are the only population with no incentive to be diplomatic. Then we rebuild the parts that carry weight.
Three engagements
We do three things. We say no to most of the rest.
Each of these runs six to fourteen weeks, with one senior consultant on the account from first conversation to handover. There is no delivery team behind us.
Engagement 01
The culture diagnostic
Six weeks of interviews, exit transcripts and HRMS data, ending in four findings and the names of the managers involved.
Engagement 02
Manager craft
Cohorts of twelve to twenty first-time managers, taught in person, practising the conversations they currently escalate to HR.
Engagement 03
Performance systems
Ratings, calibration, competency frameworks and the governance that decides who can overturn a score and on what grounds.
The job is almost never to create a feedback culture. It is to route the one that already exists. From forty-odd engagements
When a company tells us feedback does not happen here, it always does happen. It happens constantly — in the corridor outside the Kharadi office, in a WhatsApp group with eight people and no manager in it, in the car pool back to Wakad. What does not happen is that the feedback reaches the person it is about, or reaches any record that survives the month. Building a new channel on top of that is pointless. Redirecting the existing one is difficult, unglamorous and works.
What we do not sell
A short list, so nobody wastes a first call.
- Annual engagement surveys for companies under 200 people. At that size the survey is a way of avoiding four afternoons of conversation.
- Culture workshops with no follow-through and no named owner. Off-sites in Lonavala are fun. They are not an intervention.
- Recruitment, payroll, HRMS implementation or statutory compliance filing. Good firms in Pune already do those. We will name three if you ask.
- Values posters, employer-branding video scripts, or anything whose success metric is a LinkedIn impression count.
- Junior consultants shadowing a partner. If the person in your room is not the person doing the work, you are paying for a pyramid.
Where we work
Founder-led companies between forty and four hundred people.
Services firms in Baner and Viman Nagar. Product teams in Kharadi and Hinjewadi Phase 2. A handful of manufacturing groups around Chakan and Talegaon, where a good deal of the work is not in English and the standing orders on the wall matter more than any framework we could write. Everyone at Humans Society has run a people function, carried a number, or handled an exit badly and learned from it.
If the fit is wrong, we will say so in the first conversation and tell you who to call instead. That is not modesty. A misfit engagement costs us a quarter of the year, because there is only ever one client per consultant.