P&G’s Susheel Balakrishnan to join Ola as chief people officer

BENGALURU: Ola has hired former Procter & Gamble executive Susheel Balakrishnan as its chief people officer, months after the taxi aggregator launched an investigation into fraud allegations against its former human resources and administration head Yugantar Saikia.

Balakrishnan, according to his LinkedIn profile, is a managing partner at 720 Transform Consulting, a firm focussed on education, nonprofit, government and other such sectors. Prior to that, he was chief people officer at MENAPak, which runs Yum! Foods, and earlier was HR associate director at Procter & Gamble, where he worked for over a decade.

In an email to employees, Ola cofounder Bhavish Aggarwal said: “Susheel will head HR across the Ola group. He has successfully led organisation and culture change efforts that have become global best practices, in roles that have impacted 3,000 to 30,000 employees.”

Earlier this year, Ola, which recently began operations in Australia, hired former BMW Group executive Anand Shah to head strategic initiatives, specifically focusing on leading the company’s electric vehicle programme.