StrongHer by StrongYes
After 25 years in HR, Premila Braganza has stopped measuring her work the way the profession usually does. Sign-up numbers and survey scores tell her very little. What tells her something is one person, walking out of a room changed.
Premila Braganza is a Senior People & Culture Leader with more than 25 years of international HR experience, leading people strategy for teams across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Egypt. She spent nearly eighteen years with a global events business, rising from HR Advisor to Vice President of HR, where she built the HR function from the ground up across talent acquisition, succession planning, payroll, governance and learning. She is CIPD qualified and an ICF-trained coach, and is based in Dubai.
Editor’s note: HR has spent a decade learning to speak in dashboards. Premila Braganza makes the case for a different measure, and she has the stories to defend it.
The return on one person
A few years ago, Premila Braganza ran the annual wellness checkups she had been organising for years. Nothing elaborate: blood pressure, BMI, the basic numbers. Afterwards a colleague came to find her.
His blood pressure had come back very high. The nurse asked whether he knew. He had no idea. She told him to see a doctor, and he went that same afternoon.
That is the story Premila reaches for when asked how she knows whether an initiative worked, and it explains a standard that runs against most of how her profession now reports on itself. Her team would sometimes come to her deflated: only ten people signed up. Her answer was that ten is fine.
“If one person from those ten walks away and says, this is what I needed to hear, that is the ROI for that initiative,” she says.
It is not a lowering of the bar. It is a different bar. She is unconvinced by the instruments most organisations rely on, the one-to-five score, the post-workshop survey asking employees to rate the trainer. What she watches for instead is qualitative and unprompted: whether someone seeks her out afterwards and tells her, without being asked, that something made a difference.
She gives another example. A webinar on sleep, and a colleague who came to say she had struggled with insomnia for years and had finally been given something usable. The same test applies to learning: if one person leaves a workshop believing they can be a better manager, or having acquired a skill they did not have that morning, the workshop paid for itself.
“It is not about impacting large numbers. It is impacting one life at a time. One person’s mindset at a time.”
You cannot fake chemistry against a deadline
Premila’s career has been spent in an industry with an unusually unforgiving clock. When an event is announced for a date, that is the date. There is no version of the job where the deadline slips.
Building teams that can perform in that environment comes down to three things, and she is precise about the order. First, recruitment. You have to hire people who genuinely love events, who are energised rather than depleted by a pressure-cooker environment, and who can collaborate, because the work is collaborative by definition.
Second, culture, which she calls the bedrock. Not culture as a value statement, but as a set of expectations about lending a hand and going beyond your own remit when the deadline demands it.
Third, and the one she is most emphatic about, people managers. She describes them as the secret sauce of any business, and the reasoning is the old adage that people do not leave businesses, they leave managers. Which makes the calibre of your managers, and whether they have actually been trained to promote collaboration, the thing that determines whether a stressed team pulls together or comes apart.
When leaders take sides
Put sales, marketing, operations, production and client-facing teams under one deadline and the friction is predictable. Premila’s diagnosis of why is disarmingly plain: people are people. Anxiety and stress come out in good ways and bad ways, and that is simply the nature of the work.
What determines the outcome is not the friction. It is what the leaders around those teams do with it.
She has watched it go both ways. A leader can be the force that unites, acknowledging that sales sees this differently from marketing or operations and then redirecting everyone to the single shared goal: deliver a successful event, and come back afterwards to the question of who should have done what.
Or a leader can take sides. She has seen that too, the my-team-versus-your-team framing, the leader who asks how another department could do this to them. Her account of the damage is specific and worth quoting to anyone who has done it. It exacerbates everyone’s stress, and it distracts people from the actual goal, because once politics enters the equation the conversation becomes about who is shouldering the burden rather than about the work.
The right tone from a leader, in her experience, does something quite practical: it calms people down and refocuses their attention.
Culture cannot be transplanted
Leading people strategy for teams in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Egypt taught Premila something she states as a flat correction to how most multinationals think.
Culture is not a singular entity. It is not homogeneous. The culture you believe you have in one location is not necessarily the culture that same business has somewhere else, because the culture of the place itself is a major ingredient in whatever corporate culture forms there.
She is specific about where the differences bite, and it is deeper than communication style. People see authority differently. They see empowerment differently. They see accountability differently. These are not the same concepts across cultures, which means an organisation cannot simply take the culture it has built in one place and transplant it into another and expect it to survive.
What has to happen instead is that the culture creates its own identity in that market, shaped by local sensitivities. And you cannot design that from headquarters in advance. In her experience, you only learn the unique variables of a culture once you are genuinely embedded in it.
Today’s star is not tomorrow’s leader
Having built a high-potential programme, Premila has firm views on a distinction organisations routinely blur, and she considers the gap between the two enormous.
Being a high performer does not make you a high potential. You can be an excellent expert in your field, genuinely outstanding at the job you hold, and still not be the person a business should be building its future on.
What she looks for is different in kind rather than degree. Does this person encourage the people around them? Do they support their peers, lend a hand, lead by example? Does someone take the lead on a project that sits outside their job scope because they care about the subject?
That last one, she suggests, is the clearest signal available. A future leader is not defined by their job description. They are the person who says I want more, who puts their hand up, who offers an idea that will not benefit them personally but would be good for the team or the business.
She is sympathetic to the frustration this causes, because plenty of excellent people run into it. They point out, correctly, that they do their job and do it very well. Her answer is that this is not in dispute and also not the question. The assessment is about the future, not the present.
“It is not about what you do well today. It is about what you can do well tomorrow.”
What a chatbot cannot hear
Premila has watched HR technology evolve across nearly two decades, from implementing an HR and payroll system to launching an intranet, an employee portal and online learning, and her verdict on which changes actually improved employee experience turns on a shift in ownership.
A world-class HR system, she argues, is not an HR tool at all. It is owned and used by the entire business. An employee can see their own information, their trajectory, their appraisals. A manager can see how their team has progressed, raise a recruitment requisition, initiate a pay change for a promotion. The direction of travel is that ownership keeps pushing further down into the business, with HR acting as a guardian ensuring everything functions properly. What it becomes, in her phrase, is a people ecosystem for the business rather than a system HR happens to run.
She wants the next step to borrow from consumer technology. In our personal lives, brands surface things we might want. A good HR platform should do the same, suggesting courses that suit your role and where you have said you want to go, or surfacing a role in a distant location you would never have known existed. She is equally enthusiastic about AI coaching, on the grounds that coaching should be democratic and available to everyone: practise the sales pitch you are nervous about, rehearse a performance conversation before your first time delivering one.
Then she draws the line, on the question currently preoccupying her profession. Will AI replace HR? Her answer is no, and the reason is not sentimental.
A chatbot can only answer the question it was asked. It cannot detect what sits behind the question. She describes what a person does instead: noticing that a colleague does not seem themselves today and asking whether everything is all right, because they know that person well enough to hear the emotion framing the question rather than only the words in it.
Remove that and you remove the nuance that dealing with people requires. AI will supplement what HR brings, and she expects HR to use it far more than it does now. It should not replace it.
“A chatbot can only answer the question you have asked. I am sitting beyond that question, listening to the emotion that is framing it.”
Why face-to-face survived
There is a natural test case for that argument, and Premila lived through it.
When COVID arrived, the headlines were unanimous: face-to-face events were finished. Nobody would ever again get into a room with a crowd of strangers. This was the age of the virtual event.
Her response is to point at the calendar. It is 2026. How many virtual events are there now, and how many face-to-face events have endured?
Which is why she expects the value of human connection in the industry to increase rather than decline as automation becomes more visible. Her reasoning is about people rather than events: we crave human connection, and as long as that remains true, face-to-face gatherings will thrive. A conversation held in a room is a different thing from the same conversation held through a screen, and nothing available today replicates it.
From personnel to a seat at the table
Premila has worked in the UAE since the early 2000s, and the change she has watched is one she experienced from the inside.
When she started, HR was called personnel, and it was a back-office room, contracts and filing. Over the course of her career it became a people and culture function with a voice at the table, helping shape the trajectory and the success of a business.
She attributes much of that to what happened around it. As the region became more visible globally, it began attracting world-class businesses and world-class talent, and when those enter the equation, everyone’s game is raised automatically. She expects that to continue, in a country she describes as very ambitious, championing AI and much else besides. And as it does, people and culture will have to stay at the forefront too, because that is what attracting and retaining world-class talent requires.
The other shift she has watched is generational, and here she gently declines the framing of a question about young talent in the region. It is not only about one group, she says. It is about the Gen Z and Alpha generations entering work with expectations that differ fundamentally from those of previous ones.
She dates the switch to COVID. Before it, the implicit contract was that a fresh graduate with no experience should be grateful for a job and the training that came with it. Now the first questions arrive on day one, straight out of university: what can you do for me, how will you help me grow my skills, how quickly can I expect to build my career.
Premila is even-handed about the friction this creates. Those questions can land badly depending on how and when they are asked. But there are now five or six generations in the workplace, and the leaders at the top hold a very different worldview from the newest entrants, one focused on running a profitable business. Sometimes those worldviews do not align, and it is like speaking two different languages. She believes a meeting of minds is entirely possible. She is candid that not every business is equipped for it yet.
People never fail to surprise you
Asked what she understands differently after 25 years, Premila does not reach for a framework.
People never fail to surprise you. She compares them to the box of chocolates from Forrest Gump: you never know what you are going to get on any given day.
For her that is not a complaint. It is the reason the work has held her attention for a quarter of a century. People are complex, and the surprises are where the learning lives, in the person or the experience or the emotion attached to it.
“If it is predictable, it is boring. If it is unpredictable, it means you are learning something along the way.”
