In this exclusive conversation, Ruhie Pande, Group CHRO and CMO at Serentica Renewables, Resonia Ltd., and Sterlite Electric, shares with Anannya Saraswat, Correspondent at APAC Media and CXO Media, how the organisations are shaping people strategy across fast-growing energy and infrastructure businesses.
Pande discusses building a shared culture across companies at different stages of growth, preparing talent for energy transition and digital change, and strengthening leadership pipelines during rapid expansion. She also explains how data and AI are helping the group make sharper people decisions while keeping ethics and human judgment at the core.
How do you build a shared culture across Sterlite Electric, Resonia, and Serentica while keeping in consideration their different business stages and goals?
Building a shared culture across our businesses, all three at distinct stages of maturity, requires a deliberate balance between consistency and flexibility. The foundation is a unified purpose—empowering humanity by addressing the toughest challenges of clean energy delivery. Our shared values of integrity, respect, innovation, and speed also help define how people are expected to behave, treat one another, make decisions, and create value irrespective of the business context, helping strengthen this culture.
Culture is reinforced not only through leadership intent but also through how the workplace is experienced on a day-to-day basis. When employees experience the same standards of respect and accountability across locations, businesses, and roles, cultural alignment becomes tangible rather than abstract. This ensures that while our business models may diverge, our behavioural DNA remains identical.
At the same time, operating models are allowed to evolve based on business maturity. Early-stage environments may prioritise speed and experimentation, while more established businesses require structure and process. A shared culture does not mean uniformity; it means applying consistent principles thoughtfully within different operational realities. We focus on ‘freedom within a framework,’ allowing for business agility without compromising our core values.
How are you preparing the workforce for changes driven by energy transition, sustainability, and digitalisation?
Across our businesses, from renewables and transmission to manufacturing cables for grids across the world, we are committed to the energy transition. Our integrated approach to preparing our diverse workforce for digitisation, mechanisation, and automation is predicated on building strong systems that can pivot with agility and a future-ready culture. We are investing early and deliberately in skilling pipelines through academic partnerships, in-house academies, and on-the-job learning models that prepare talent for evolving roles across these sectors.
Alongside technical capability, we are embedding sustainability and digital thinking into everyday work. Sustainability is treated as an operational responsibility, reflected in role design, performance expectations, and leadership behaviours—not as a standalone initiative. In parallel, we are adopting digital and AI-enabled tools across talent acquisition, learning, and performance management to improve speed, insight, and scalability, while ensuring decisions remain ethical and human-led. The goal is to transition our people from being ‘digitally aware’ to being ‘digitally fluent.’
Equally important is building organisational resilience. Through internal mobility, cross-business exposure, and structured leadership pipelines, we enable continuous learning and adaptability. Together, these interventions ensure our workforce is not only equipped for change but also confident and committed to leading it. We view this not as a one-time upskilling engagement, but as the creation of a permanent ‘learning muscle.’
What have been the biggest people-related challenges during periods of rapid growth or transformation?
During periods of rapid growth or transformation, the biggest people-related challenges emerge at the intersection of structure, culture, and continuity.
One key challenge is building the right people-architecture at speed—clearly defining roles, accountability, and decision frameworks so growth strengthens execution rather than creating friction. As organisations scale or integrate new entities, even small ambiguities can slow momentum and dilute impact. In high-growth phases, ‘clarity is kindness’; without it, talent burns out trying to navigate unmapped terrain.
Equally critical is sustaining cultural alignment during change. Growth brings new teams, leaders, and operating models, and without deliberate reinforcement, values can weaken. We address this through consistent communication, leadership alignment, and embedding values into everyday decisions—ensuring people remain anchored even as structures evolve.
The third challenge is safeguarding knowledge and leadership continuity. Rapid expansion often creates dependency on a few individuals. The focus, therefore, is on building scalable systems—leadership pipelines, succession benches, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms—so performance is driven by organisational capability, not individual delivery. We work to institutionalise excellence so that our successes are repeatable and scalable.
How do you approach diversity and inclusion across manufacturing, energy, and corporate teams?
Our approach to diversity and inclusion across manufacturing, energy, and corporate teams is intentional and rooted in long-term capability building for business. We focus not only on representation but also on creating environments where diverse talent can participate, perform, and grow.
In manufacturing and energy roles, this begins with redesigning both the talent pipeline and the workplace ecosystem. Through structured initiatives such as Project Pragati and Project Shakti, we actively develop women for shop floor, technical, and operational roles by combining classroom learning, on-the-job exposure, mentorship, and leadership development. Alongside this, we invest in enabling infrastructure, safety, and manager sensitisation to ensure inclusion is experienced daily, not just articulated in policy. We are moving beyond ‘diversity numbers’ to ‘inclusion outcomes.’ It is about creating a ‘meritocracy of perspective’ where diverse backgrounds lead to better business decisions.
Across corporate teams, our emphasis is on equitable growth, inclusive leadership pipelines, and transparent decision-making. While the contexts differ, the principle remains consistent: diversity must strengthen performance and sustainability. For us, inclusion is a business imperative—intentionally designed, consistently reinforced, and measured by outcomes.
How are you using technology and data to make better people decisions across the group?
We are using technology and data to move from retrospective reporting to predictive insight. By creating a ‘single source of truth’ across our diverse businesses, we ensure that talent decisions—from hiring to succession—are as rigorous and evidence-based as our financial or operational ones.
Data allows us to democratize opportunity; it helps us identify ‘hidden gems’ within our internal workforce who have the skills to pivot into new business areas, regardless of their current function/role. We are also leveraging data to measure ‘organisational health’ in real-time, allowing leaders to intervene proactively before issues like attrition or burnout impact business performance.
Data does not replace the ‘human’ in HR; it helps us be more precise, fair, and impactful in how we manage our greatest asset.
What role does AI play today in your HR processes, and where do you see the biggest impact in the near future?
We use AI selectively across talent acquisition, skill building, and continuous performance management to improve speed, consistency, and decision quality—while keeping human accountability firmly at the center. It helps us surface insights faster, reduce operational bias, and create a more objective starting point for people’s decisions, especially in high-volume and skill-scarce environments.
The biggest near-term impact of AI in HR processes will be in three areas:
- Skills, Intelligence, and Workforce Planning: Allowing us to map capability adjacencies, predict future skill gaps, and redeploy talent more dynamically across our ecosystem instead of relying on external hiring.
- Personalised Learning at Scale: Moving from generic training to role- and aspiration-based learning journeys that evolve in real-time as business needs shift.
- Predictive People Analytics: Helping leaders identify early risk signals around attrition, burnout, or leadership readiness, so interventions are proactive rather than reactive
That said, ethics, transparency, and bias control are non-negotiable. AI may inform decisions, but it does not replace human context, empathy, or responsibility. The real advantage comes from ‘augmented intelligence’—where technology handles the volume/complexity of data so that HR can focus on the nuances of human connection.
What challenges have you faced while driving digital HR transformation across multiple businesses?
Driving digital HR transformation across multiple businesses has required us to balance scale with sensitivity to very different operating contexts. One of the key challenges has been creating common digital frameworks while respecting the realities of manufacturing floors, project sites, and corporate environments. A one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work.
Equally critical has been ensuring adoption. Digital tools only create value when they are embedded into daily workflows. This meant simplifying systems, investing time in on-ground enablement, and building confidence among leaders and frontline teams that data and technology are enablers—not surveillance mechanisms. Transformation is 20% technology and 80% mindset; the challenge is always in the ‘last mile’ of adoption.
Another challenge has been keeping the transformation human-centric. As we integrate analytics and AI across talent acquisition, performance, and learning, we remain deliberate about preserving judgment, transparency, and ethical decision-making.
Our focus has been to design digital HR as an invisible backbone—strengthening consistency, improving decision quality, and enabling scale—while ensuring the employee experience remains intuitive, inclusive, and deeply connected to our culture and business priorities. Success for us is when technology fades into the background because it has become a seamless part of how we work and lead.
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