Get ready for a masterclass in navigating uncertainty in this episode of AdvantageClub.ai‘s Inspiring Leaders & Leadership podcast, Season 2. We sit down with Shirin Sehgal, Chief People Officer at PwC India, to explore how one of the world’s largest professional services firms kept 30,000+ employees engaged, motivated, and connected through some of the most turbulent years in recent memory. Hosted by Smiti, founder of AdvantageClub.ai, this conversation unpacks Shirin’s 23-year career journey and the leadership philosophy that has shaped it: one built on discomfort, environment, and always creating value for others.
A Chat with Shirin Sehgal
Join us as Shirin shares how PwC reimagined employee experience through “moments that matter,” why employer branding must work as hard internally as it does externally, and how the firm is using automation and AI to reshape everything from recruitment to rewards. She also offers a bold look ahead at what HR leadership will demand in the future, from outcome-based delivery to a shift away from loyalty and toward quality. It’s a candid, wide-ranging conversation packed with practical frameworks for anyone leading people through change.
Here is the excerpt:
Smiti
Hi everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of the Inspiring Leaders and Leadership podcast, Season 2. Today we have a wonderful speaker with us, who is here to join me on my podcast. We have Shirin, who is the Chief People Officer of PwC, and I would love to welcome her to join the show today.
Welcome, Shirin.
Shirin
Thank you for having me, Smiti. Good to be here.
Smiti
We’re super excited to have you here as well. I know you’re a very busy person, and I’m really excited and glad that you took the time out to actually spend these 20 minutes with us and our viewers. So let’s start and kick off this session. I know all about you, but I would love to have the viewers also learn a little bit more about you. Being the CPO of PwC, I’m sure it would have been like an incredible journey to reach where you’ve reached today. We would love to understand a little bit about your career journey till now.
Shirin
My career journey has been fairly interesting, and until reality strikes you, you don’t realize what you’re up for. When I took up this role, I did feel that it’s a big one, and whether I’ll be able to do it or not, but as you go through the rungs of a large role, a large organization, you do realize that there are a lot of support mechanisms around you to sort of help you succeed, and you need to leverage those.
So, with that, coming to your question about my journey and what makes a leader, I think you should use your environment. That’s the first tenet. Using support from the environment is very, very important. Always ask, always seek out, always let others lead, because the moment you do that, you become completely important in that particular persona because you’re also bringing value to the environment and to the firm through others. That’s the first one.
The second is discomfort; I have believed in discomfort a lot. Every two or two and a half years in my entire 23-year journey, I’ve done a different role or a job, whether it’s in the same firm or an outside firm. So discomfort or being uncomfortable is important. You can’t be comfortable and expect to rise and succeed and do things in life that you want to do.
And the third is to always keep creating value. I remember one of my senior leaders from Genpact used to say that you always work to make yourself redundant. You do that not because you want to move out, but because you want to move up. The people who report to you, the people who are a part of your team, will succeed when they see you succeed.
So I think these three things- being uncomfortable, looking at your environment for leverage and support, and the third one, looking at your people around you and the strengths around you – are important.
Smiti
That’s amazing. It’s been 20 or 21 years since you’ve been in the industry, and that’s incredible. And of course, nothing ever is achieved when you’re in your comfort zone; you have to come out of that actually to make things happen. So it’s been incredible, and I applaud you for all your wonderful achievements and wish you all the best for your future achievements as well.
So let’s talk a little bit now about the industry itself. Last year, as we all know, was not a pretty picture for everyone. It’s been hard on the industry. There’s been a lot of media buzz, and a lot of media angst around smaller companies, startups, and companies going bust and everything, but what has been different on the enterprise side? I want to talk a little bit about that. It has been hard on everybody, including the largest of large organizations that never saw any attrition, or rarely fired people. So, obviously, PwC being a massive organization, it would have been hard on your company as well, and employee morale was really hard to keep up because employees were hard to retain, forget about their morale. So how did you ensure that employee morale remained high in your organization in all these uncertain scenarios? And you obviously have to manage all stakeholders as well, you can’t just keep throwing budgets in that scenario. So how did you manage the employee engagement in your company?
Shirin
In fact, I don’t even attribute it to one year. It’s the last two years or two and a half years that have been tough for different reasons. There have been reasons where people have been unwell, there have been reasons where people weren’t able to meet each other, and then there were reasons of people coming back to work and not being able to adjust with each other. So, what does a firm do to make people productive and help them continue doing what they’re doing? And while it was a difficult year in terms of people staying back in organizations, they were getting hired left, right, and center by competition, by various industries, and everyone was growing. And the good news, the silver lining in the situation, was that business was also growing. There was a lot of work coming in; there was a lot of environment that was growing for certain industries. India, anyway, had a growth trajectory. So I think organizations like ours had that leverage.
Coupled with that, in the last one and a half or two years, we’ve moved our concentration to shifting and changing our experience strategy for the firm. We’ve tried to create frameworks and recall factors. We’ve tried to create branding around what we do for our people and link and label those initiatives with what they are able to enjoy and use in their journeys, whether it’s benefits, learning, rewards, or a caring environment focused on well-being.
We’ve brought in different policies around insurance and increased learning reimbursements. We also relooked at our mobility policy and introduced something like a benevolent fund so that, when people pass away, we can provide a pensionable income to their families. We have also reached out to people with disabilities and brought in more diversity, creating a holistic environment. We constantly ask ourselves whether, when it comes to rewards, we are doing enough for people to appreciate and value what they’re doing, both from a compensation and recognition perspective.
If it’s about creating a caring environment, are we able to ensure that people have easy access to get their testing done? Do they have easy access to reimbursement for those tests? Do they have enough good vendors so that hospitalization issues and family welfare don’t become a concern for them? That’s how you move up the value chain in those areas for everybody.
The second thing we did was create “Moments That Matter.” We created a robust strategy around conducting all-India, pan-India events for our people, which touched 30,000 lives at one go. We calendarized those events and used to have two every month, whether it was health check-up camps in the office, celebrating Pride Week, or organizing Holi and Diwali celebrations. Everything happened on the same day, in all cities, at the same time, for all PwC employees.
That entire aura you create around “Moments That Matter” makes a difference. Today, if people tell me they’re coming to the office and are standing and working because there’s no space for them to sit, as we really have to think about real estate, it’s great news for me because I love it. People are coming back to the office because they want to meet their friends and colleagues.
I don’t have to struggle to create policies around promotion-linked return to office, which I read about in the newspapers today. Those are different approaches that are attributed to a push factor. I need to create a pull factor in the organization so that people genuinely want to come.
So, I think those are some of the things, Smiti, that help create an environment people cherish, connect with, relate to, and feel like coming to the office for. Those were some of the things that we did. Maybe I’m not able to list all of them, but we did revisit about 10 to 15 different policies for everybody from both a coverage and depth perspective.
Smiti
Yeah, and I completely agree with you. All the fads, especially around return to office, including office peacocking and all of those trends, are coming in. At the end of the day, I think if you have a great culture and you’re focused on moments that matter, like you mentioned, it helps bring people back to the office willingly instead of forcing them to return.
You also mentioned one really important thing that I wanted to delve a little deeper into, and that’s employer branding. I think it’s something that even the largest organizations struggle with today. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how employer branding can contribute to higher engagement scores or create a better experience for employees. Any thoughts on that?
Shirin
I always say employer branding is not only for the external world; it is for my internal employees as well. If we are a world in itself, 30,000 people and counting, it’s impossible for me to reach out to all 30,000 personally and tell them, “These are the 15 things that the firm is doing for you. Are you able to use all of them?” So what is my way of reaching out internally? It’s my internal branding, internal comms, outreach programs, creating technology forums where people can log in and share their feedback and feelings, feedback surveys, recognition platforms. These are my internal branding tools to get people to relate to, understand, and be proud of the firm they are a part of. That’s what internal branding means for me.
Secondly, external branding becomes extremely important from a campus standpoint, from a “get them early, young” standpoint. It is also important for lateral hiring and alumni hiring. You have to create the right messaging about how you’re doing business in the market. You also have to communicate how you’re evolving, adapting, and leading with the changing business dynamics that the world, the country, and society are experiencing.
The third aspect is revisiting different stages of the employee lifecycle that attract people to your organization. Is a campus hire looking at insurance? Maybe not. A campus hire is probably asking, “What kind of exciting projects will I get over the next two or three years, and will I learn?”
What is a lateral hire looking for? A lateral hire is probably looking for stability, a good role, a strong job profile, and competitive compensation. What is an alumnus looking for? They’re asking, “What were you doing before? What are you doing now? Does it make sense for me to come back to your firm?”
These are my branding moments that position us in the market, where the aspirational value of being at PwC should be at the highest level. That’s what employer branding means to me, and that’s what we try to achieve across all our initiatives.
Smiti
I love how you’ve linked branding with profiling. The same branding doesn’t work for everybody. A lateral hire is looking for something very different from what a fresher expects from the company. Giving both of them the same branding may not work. Curating and customizing it based on your target audience is an amazing thought process as well.
Great. Let’s now talk about technology adoption in general. How has technology reshaped the landscape in your company, especially when it comes to HR efforts to drive better engagement? Have you adopted technology extensively, and how does that work internally?
Shirin
Our journey started about two or three years ago when we ventured into the automation space for our ETC journey. Whether it’s creating bots, building chat assistants, rationalizing the way we handle documentation and letters, standardizing templates, automating them, or reaching out to 30,000 people with the click of a button, all of that has happened.
We became fairly comfortable with those changes because we wanted to do more work with the same headcount from both a scale and scope perspective. Now, what we’re trying to do is define a technology transformation journey for the function that can better serve the organization’s needs.
Am I able to understand whether employees are happy with the policies they’re working with? Whether they’re going through mid-year or year-end appraisals, are they satisfied with the quality of conversations and feedback? We’ve introduced listening tools into the organization that act as listening assistants. Whether through Microsoft Teams or other triggers, they ask simple questions like, “How is your Monday feeling?” Employees respond quickly, and those nudges help us understand how the majority of the organization feels about what’s happening. That allows us to stop doing things that are no longer valuable and introduce new ones instead.
That’s one aspect: employee outreach and sentiment analysis. The second aspect is efficiency. Recruitment is a major area. With a workforce of 30,000 people and attrition of around 15 to 20 percent, we have roughly 10,000 people joining and leaving at different points in time, including campus hires. Automation, enterprise tools, and external platforms help us reduce hiring manager effort, free people from repetitive tasks, and make it easier to review profiles on Android or iOS devices. Managers can conduct video interviews on their phones and complete, record, and submit interviews quickly. That ease of doing business is gradually becoming part of our day-to-day processes from a long-term operational perspective.
The third aspect is AI and predictability. We have around 1,700 skills across the organization, which can be grouped into roughly 100 job families. We’re exploring tools that can rewrite job descriptions with the click of a button whenever new roles come up, instead of someone having to write them manually.
Do I have an AI job writer? Do I have Copilot licenses that can summarize meetings and presentations? Are we helping people become comfortable using digital assets through our upskilling programs to make their work easier? Overall, we’re trying to make doing business simpler through technology.
Last but not least is simplification for our people. We want hyperpersonalized access to tools where employees can see everything about their journey in one place with the click of a button. It may sound like we’re only entering this space now and that we should have been there earlier. But the fact that we’re here now is equally important. These are some of the things, Smiti. I could go on because we’re on a very strong technology transformation journey for the ETC function over the next two years. But if I had to summarize it today, I’d say our focus is on process, efficiency, cost, and improving the speed at which we operate through technology.
Smiti
That’s amazing. I love how you’re leveraging AI and different digital tools. With the rise of generative AI, it’s only going to become easier over time. Like you said, modifications to offer letters and similar tasks can all be handled by AI instead of someone having to manually customize each one.
Let’s now shift the focus to total rewards and employee well-being. From what I understand, you’re mostly remote or operating in a hybrid model. What kinds of initiatives have you introduced to support hybrid work, total rewards, and employee well-being? I know PwC places a lot of emphasis on these areas.
Shirin
One is continuing to do what we already do through our existing tools and mechanisms. Around 20 to 25 percent of the population has engaged with our rewards and recognition programs, which are part of our regular business processes. Of course, there’s room to refresh those programs and explore new approaches, perhaps even solutions like what your organization offers, just as an example. Refreshing our business-as-usual rewards approach is something that’s currently in our near-term plans.
The second thing we’ve done is create ring-fenced and specialized recognition programs. Are we rewarding people who are contributing significantly to our transformation journeys? Is there trust in the system, and are people being recognized through that lens? Are we acknowledging those who deliver exceptional results on projects or receive outstanding client feedback, such as high Net Promoter Scores? The idea behind this second layer of rewards and recognition is to focus on specific groups of employees who may not always be recognized through the broader programs. You really can’t ignore those contributions.
The third aspect is creating an environment of transparency and trust around rewards and recognition. Can leaders openly talk about compensation from a strategic perspective? Absolutely. Can leaders explain compensation benchmarks and why we position ourselves at a certain percentile because that’s aligned with our affordability, business model, and talent strategy? They should.
Last but not least, our leaders continue investing in and talking about rewards and recognition from a go-to-market perspective. Whether it’s specific skills or specialized areas of work, are we attracting the right talent at the right premium? I’m not saying we’ve perfected all of this, but these are the areas we’re actively thinking about, and we’re already doing many of them.
Smiti
I think you’ve covered it all. One thing you’ve highlighted is that rewards and recognition aren’t just about completing a task or demonstrating a core value. There are multiple opportunities throughout an employee’s journey where recognition can make an impact, and that’s how you create an end-to-end recognition framework. Awesome.
I think one last question to wrap up this conversation. Most of our viewers are either HR leaders or aspiring HR leaders. What would be your advice for the HR leaders of tomorrow?
Shirin
The HR leaders of tomorrow will be very different from the HR leaders of today. They will be much more value-driven and bring a rich variety of experiences. They may believe in things that aren’t even considered relevant today. Today, the focus is on physical discipline, being in the office, adherence to holidays, absenteeism, and working from a particular office location or building. Tomorrow, or perhaps even sooner than we think, the focus will simply be on what you’ve delivered, how much you’ve delivered, what your goals are, what your aspirations are, and the value you bring to the firm.
Secondly, HR leaders of tomorrow should be prepared to focus less on loyalty and more on quality. Work will increasingly become outcome-based rather than time-based. Organizations will value results more than hours worked.
Personally, I believe moonlighting will become much more common over the next few years. I don’t know whether regulations will fully allow it, but I don’t think people will mind because organizations will pay for the value of the work rather than an individual’s time. These are some of the more radical shifts that I think people should be prepared for.
Overall, my biggest advice to everyone in the corporate world, whether in HR or not, is simply to have fun every day at work. If you’re genuinely enjoying what you do, the outcomes and the quality of your work become exponentially better. You can’t deliver your best when you’re droopy-eyed. You have to be bright-eyed when you’re delivering. That’s my biggest takeaway.
Smiti
That’s amazing. “Be bright-eyed when you’re delivering.” I think that’s the mantra we’ll all take home today. Thank you so much, Shirin. We’re at the end of our time, and I’d just like to express my gratitude for spending this time with us today. Thank you so much. I’m sure our viewers will feel truly inspired after listening to you.
Shirin
Anything that helps create value in the system is worth it. Thank you, Smiti.
Concluding Thoughts
Shirin Sehgal’s approach to leadership, rooted in discomfort, environment, and value creation, offers a compelling playbook for HR leaders navigating an era defined by constant disruption. Her emphasis on building internal and external employer brands with equal intention, coupled with a clear-eyed view of how technology and outcome-based work will reshape HR’s future, is a reminder that great people strategy is both deeply human and forward-looking. Thank you, Shirin, for sharing your journey and your candid insights with us.
**This podcast was recorded during Shirin’s tenure at PwC and published on YouTube on February 5, 2024.
