OrgRails designs and runs the operating system for people functions — for companies building one for the first time, and for companies whose current one has quietly stopped working.
For founders, CEOs and CHROs who know their people function should be doing more than keeping the organisation running.
I've spent my career inside the machinery of people functions — designing how HR work is routed, who owns which decisions, and what the business is actually able to ask of its HR partners. Most recently that meant redesigning the HRBP operating model inside a global transformation supporting more than 300,000 employees.
What I learned there applies at every size. When a people function isn't delivering, the cause is almost never the people in it. It's that nobody has decided where work should go, who owns it, or what the function is accountable for beyond responsiveness. That's a design problem, and design problems are fixable.
OrgRails exists to do that work — at enterprise scale for organisations rebuilding a function, and in a much lighter form for companies building one for the first time.
The underlying question is the same either way — what should this function own, who does the work, and what is it accountable for? The scale of the answer is what differs.
India's four labour codes came into force in November 2025 and states are still notifying their rules. Most companies under 150 people are now running non-compliant salary structures, missing appointment letters and an unconstituted POSH committee.
If you're a technology company assuming this doesn't apply: the Factories Act doesn't, but your state's Shops & Establishments Act does, and the Code on Wages applies to every establishment regardless of sector. The Karnataka and Telangana IT exemptions are narrow, time-limited and conditional.
Most HR problems presented as capability problems are routing problems. These are the five things we look at, in this order, at any size of organisation.
Work is entering the function in the wrong place, and has been for long enough that nobody questions it.
Where each category of work should enter, who owns it, and who enforces that when a leader goes around it.
What the function spends its scarce senior capacity on, measured against what the business says it needs.
What HR is answerable for beyond responsiveness. Skip this and the model reverts within a year.
How the model actually runs week to week — the meetings, the data, the decisions it exists to produce.
The HRBP role is defined on paper as strategic partnership. In practice it becomes the place where unassigned work goes to live — and adding headcount buys about two quarters of relief.
Both, and they're priced differently. On path two we design — operating models, org structures, accountability. On path one we run the function day to day: onboarding, offboarding, the employee helpdesk, compliance, hiring. Advice without execution tends not to survive contact with a busy quarter.
The Factories Act doesn't — there's no manufacturing, and that one accurate fact is where the belief comes from. Almost everything else does. Your governing statute is your state's Shops & Establishments Act, and the Code on Wages applies to every establishment regardless of sector or headcount. The Karnataka and Telangana IT exemptions cover one Act and five sections respectively, they expire, and they carry conditions — Telangana's requires a constituted POSH committee and maintained registers.
One hire gives you one person's experience and one person's availability, plus the recruitment cost, the ramp-up, the notice period and the risk that they leave with all the context. You also get whatever seniority you can afford, which at this stage is rarely the seniority you need for the decisions that matter.
Yes, and in practice it doesn't seem to matter. What a new joiner cares about is that there's a named person, a real inbox and a predictable response time.
No. We handle the operating reality — documenting it, fixing it and keeping it fixed — and bring in labour counsel where a formal legal opinion is genuinely required.
Thirty minutes, no deck. Tell me how your people function is structured today and where it keeps getting stuck. I'll tell you on the call whether there's a problem worth paying to solve — and if there isn't, I'll say that too.