Building people functions teams actually trust.

I am Pawan Joshi, an HR and operations leader based in Kathmandu, and I have spent more than ten years building people functions that teams actually trust rather than merely tolerate. My work has run across Nepal, the Philippines, Australia, India and the United States, which means every policy I write has to survive five different labour regimes, four currencies and a dozen very different assumptions about what a manager owes an employee.

Most of what I do as a global HR consultant is unglamorous and cumulative. I design hiring loops that produce comparable evidence instead of gut reactions, write compensation bands that a finance leader and a first-time engineer can both read without an interpreter, and build onboarding that still works when the new joiner is nine time zones away from the person who hired them. When those systems hold, trust becomes the default rather than something leadership has to keep repurchasing with perks.

Companies usually call me at one of three moments: they are about to hire in Nepal for the first time and want to know whether an employer of record, a local entity or a contractor arrangement is the honest answer; they have grown past the point where one spreadsheet and a founder's memory can run the people function; or they have inherited a team where the org chart quietly stopped matching the way the product is actually built.

Multi-country HR operations is the centre of the practice. I run payroll and compliance on one performance cadence across borders, localising only what the law and the culture genuinely require, because a policy that has been rewritten eleven times for eleven markets is a policy nobody can enforce. In Nepal that means the Labour Act, the Social Security Fund and gratuity handled correctly the first time; in Australia and the United States it means classification, notice periods and severance that hold up under review.

The other half of the work is written down in public. The Playbook holds the templates, scripts and rubrics I actually use — career ladders, one-on-one structures, severance language, performance conversations — and Insights is where I argue through the harder questions, including what happens to the HR profession as artificial intelligence takes over the parts of the job that were never really human work in the first place.

If you are a founder, a people leader or a student trying to understand how modern HR operations are built, everything here is free to read and free to copy. The engagements I take on are deliberately few, and they tend to be the ones where the people function is about to become the constraint on growth.

Two questions come up in almost every first conversation. The first is what a serious people function actually costs at twenty, fifty and two hundred employees, and the honest answer is that the cost is mostly discipline rather than headcount or software. The second is whether hiring in Nepal is a short-term cost play or a durable operating decision, and after placing more than two thousand five hundred people across the region I would argue it is the latter, provided you pay properly, register with the Social Security Fund and manage the team as colleagues rather than as an offshore resource pool.