Beliefs
Eight positions, including the ones that cost us work.
A consultancy that agrees with every prospect has no method, only availability. Here is what we think, stated plainly enough to be disagreed with before you pay us anything.
1. The manager conversation is the whole system
Every people process in a company — the appraisal, the promotion, the exit, the salary revision — eventually resolves into one person saying something difficult to another person in a small room. Every framework, form and policy exists to make that conversation better. Most of them make it worse, because they give the manager a document to hide behind. If a change we propose does not visibly improve what gets said in that room, it is decoration and we drop it.
2. Engagement scores measure willingness to answer a survey
We are not against measurement. We are against measuring the wrong quantity precisely. A 4.1 on "my manager cares about me as a person" in a firm of ninety people tells you that people are polite, that the survey was not truly anonymous, and that the question was written by somebody in another country. Twelve exit conversations read in one sitting with the names removed will give you three sharper findings inside twenty minutes, and those findings will have names attached.
People leave managers, not companies. Half true, and the half that is wrong is the expensive half.
3. Attrition is a two-person failure, not a one-person failure
In our casework the manager is usually the trigger. But what turns friction into a resignation letter is that there was no second adult to talk to. No skip-level that actually happened. No HR business partner who had met the person before the notice period started. Skip-levels held on a real calendar are the cheapest retention instrument available in India, and companies drop them first when the quarter gets busy.
4. Governance beats the form
Before you redesign an appraisal form, write down in two paragraphs how a rating gets decided and who is allowed to overturn it. Most companies do this backwards: they perfect the form in November, discover mid-calibration in February that nobody agreed who breaks a tie between a delivery head and a practice lead, and lose the cycle to a four-hour argument in a conference room. The form is an afternoon of work. The governance is the engagement.
5. A competency framework nobody can give an example for does not exist
We test frameworks by reading them aloud to the managers expected to apply them and asking for one real example per behaviour, from the last quarter, with a name. A recent client's engineering leads managed four out of nineteen. Their framework is now four behaviours long. It is used in every calibration meeting, which the nineteen-behaviour version never was.
6. Culture is downstream of who gets promoted
You can run values workshops for a year. The moment a manager who bullies well and ships fast gets a band promotion in April, everyone in the building has updated their model of what the company rewards, and they are right to. We spend a disproportionate amount of time inside promotion and calibration decisions for exactly this reason. It is where the values are actually written.
7. Compliance work is not culture work, and pretending otherwise is dangerous
An Internal Committee constituted under the POSH Act, 2013 is a legal obligation with defined timelines, a presiding officer, an external member and an annual report to the District Officer. It is not a culture initiative and it should never be presented as one to a workforce. We design grievance processes that sit alongside the statutory machinery and make it usable — who receives a complaint at 9pm, what gets written down, what a plant HR lead in Chakan does when the respondent is a shift supervisor. We do not act as an external IC member for our own clients. That is a conflict, and firms that offer both should be asked about it.
8. Small is a method, not a stage we are trying to leave
Humans Society has been two to ten people since 2019 and intends to stay there. One consultant, one client. No utilisation targets, because utilisation targets are what turn a diagnostic into a survey — a survey scales, and listening does not. This costs us the large mandates that require thirty bodies. We have made peace with that.
Consequences
What these positions cost us, honestly.
We lose most RFPs that specify a benchmarked engagement index. We lose work to firms who will promise a culture transformation in eight weeks. We turn down retainers where the brief is to produce quarterly reporting for a board that has already decided what it wants to hear. And we occasionally tell a founder in the first meeting that the problem is a co-founder, which ends the conversation and the opportunity at the same time.
What we get in exchange is a practice where the person you met is the person in your one-on-one eleven weeks later, and where we can name what changed. That trade has held for seven years.