Karn Kher

Background

About Karn Kher

The best HR decisions come from understanding the business first and reaching for the data second. That operating philosophy has shaped 14 years of work across global, matrixed, and commercially demanding environments. The foundation is HR Business Partnering — working directly with senior leaders across Risk, Operations, and Treasury at a global trading firm, and with creative and operations teams at a media company. That experience built the discipline to listen to what a function actually needs, separate the real problem from the stated one, and earn credibility with business leaders who expect HR to keep up commercially. The consistent finding across those partnerships: the gap between understanding a people problem and solving it well is almost always a data gap. That gap led to building the capability directly — establishing the Global People Analytics team at Trafigura, migrating from manual reporting to Workday Prism dashboards, and developing AI-enabled attrition prediction tools and compensation models. The same logic applies to Total Rewards. Compensation design is not a benchmarking exercise — it is a retention, motivation, and fairness problem. Benchmarking across many countries and roles, managing merit and bonus cycles, and building a job architecture for all org profiles — all of it is anchored in what the business is actually trying to do with its people, not just what the market median says. The breadth extends further: org restructures with EY across 9 entertainment channels, L&D ownership for employees, an expat rotation programme, and currently leading Indian Labour Code salary alignment.