Choosing Your Own Vibe: In Conversation With Ms. Shruti Mishra

Keeping up with our endeavor to highlight exemplary voices from the field of Human Resources, this week our team got the chance to interview Ms. Shruti Mishra and learn from her varied experiences. She is currently a Senior Human Resources Business Partner for Empower, having worked in the past with organizations like Infosys and Thomson Reuters. 

Highlighting her journey, she mentioned that HR was always her true calling, followed by law. Her passion emerged from her desire to make a difference for people. Over time, it has transformed into something greater – the ability to break down complex problems and find simple solutions in the corporate world. 

Describing her growth-oriented mindset, Ms. Shruti elaborates,

“I have dipped my hands into many projects around talent transformation, organisational design, setting up HR functions from scratch in organisations, and talent acquisition amongst others. I chose to be a big fish in a small pond with the choice of my organisations as I wanted to learn in places where things are not as structured as they should be.”  

As she continued working in diverse areas, the biggest challenges that she faced as an HR professional were to find a seat at the table and leverage that seat to bring value. Her overarching goals have been to keep HR relevant and engaged by ensuring constant growth and learning. She insists that one must never forget this, irrespective of the years of experience that one may have. 

Striking the highly elusive work-life balance has been a challenge with the demands of the role, but Ms. Shruti adds –

 “My personal mantra is to divide my time into compartments and make conscious efforts to separate personal and professional life.” 

The pandemic further increased these challenges and made the separation harder, as Ms. Shruti describes the mental toll it took on HR professionals. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shift to work from home have changed how people view HR. The Human Resources department managed to guide organizations through employee-oriented decision making, keeping in mind that they themselves are employees. As the work shifts to a hybrid model, HR is presented with new challenges as some studies conclude that over 82% of respondents felt more comfortable working from home than from the office. Ms. Shruti elaborates and adds that – 

“Resilience and openness to seek help are the keys to being a successful HR professional operating during a pandemic.”

Ms. Shruti Mishra works and lives by a simple philosophy – don’t be afraid of taking risks in your career and getting your hands dirty. She believes that they will either make you or break you, but will give you a path enriched with immense learning. Her word of caution for emerging HR professionals rings true, you can either choose to be a cost center or be strategic enough to positively impact the EVP. She ends with her golden mantra “Remember that you choose your own vibe!”