Job-hunting with a résumé gap? Nightmare fuel—especially when that gap is a mental health break. Just ask Ritesh Raman. The 32-year-old Bengaluru-based MBA grad spent months in 2022 explaining why he took time off. Hiring managers weren’t thrilled.
Enter Target, an American retail corporation that sounds like a unicorn amongst corporates. During his job interview, Raman laid it all out—his burnout and his need for a workplace that gets it. Instead of silence and discomfort, Raman’s concerns were met with empathy. “For the first time, it felt like somebody was actually listening to my point of view instead of judging me for prioritising my mental health.”
Target wasn’t just offering a flexible hybrid setup—it was setting the bar on mental health support. As Raman found out, the company backed emotional wellbeing in a big way, with everything from a dedicated counselling helpline and employee resource groups to personal therapy sessions. Their 6,000-people strong workforce in Bengaluru can book in-person counselling or online appointments—eight free sessions a year, no questions asked. Raman? He’s made full use of them. So have most of his colleagues and even managers.
Raman’s experience is just the tip of the iceberg as more and more corporates in India are confronting a frightening surge in emotional burnout. As per the 2024 Gallup State of the Global Workplace report, which examined employee mental health and well-being worldwide, 86 per cent of the Indian workforce admitted to ‘struggling’ or ‘suffering’ at work rather than ‘thriving’. These numbers expose the cracks in an old-school corporate culture that treats employees like productivity machines. The Karnataka government’s proposal to extend working hours in some sectors to 12 hours a day, and Narayana Murthy’s 70-hour workweek wish? Yeah, that’s all part of the problem.
Globally, companies are bent on proving the efficacy of four-day workweeks, because long work hours aren’t just outdated—they’re also inefficient. Today’s forward-thinking CEOs understand that fulfilled employees are productive employees. But what would Indian offices look like if work wasn’t the centre of everything?
Enter organisational psychologists, the hottest hires for corporate India right now.
Preeti D’mello, founder of The Fulfillment Institute—a startup that offers leadership coaching and training to corporates to help them build smarter, softer workplaces—helps companies rethink how they grow people and profits at the same time. For D’mello, who spent a decade steering culture and leadership at Tata Consultancy Services and has worked across 49 countries, “fulfillment isn’t a perk—it’s the future of work”.
Her approach to EQ blends neuroscience, positive psychology, and real-deal organisational strategy to build trauma-informed workplaces. If only leaders have the tools to show up with focus and emotional clarity, workplaces can adopt mindfulness practices and regular check-ins for employees that go beyond lip service.
Think of an organisational psychologist as an emotional strategist in the office—part therapist, part systems whisperer, and entirely focused on making work feel human. Unlike HR, they are not here to push policy. “Organisational psychologists differ from HR professionals in that they have a background in Psychology and are trained to focus on organisational health, leadership, team dynamics, and overall workplace well-being. While there can be areas of overlap, HR typically handles recruitment, employee relations, and administrative processes,” says Deepti Chandy, therapist and COO, Anna Chandy and Associates.
Simply put, organisational psychologists work at both individual and systemic levels. Whether it’s personally coaching leaders through anxiety and burnout, offering employee-focused suggestions, or designing systems that quietly transform company culture, they offer a confidential, judgment-free zone and an innate understanding of emotional well-being. Often, they act as a bridge between employee discontent and managerial indifference. In different offices, they may be known by different designations—organisational psychologist, mindfulness coach, wellbeing leader or chief happiness officer—but their purpose is the same: to focus on employees’ mental and emotional health.
Today, in the modern Indian workplace, senior leadership is coming to terms with the fact that rewards and recognition are not only about money. It is also about: Do you understand how I feel? That’s a question that has never been asked before.”—Saloni Suri
Neuro coach Saloni Suri, who works with the top brass in companies like HDFC Bank, Ambit, and RPG Group, says it’s the younger workforce spearheading the conversation around mental health at work. Unlike millennials, Gen Z isn’t chasing corner offices but demanding to be seen and heard. “Today, in the modern Indian workplace, senior leadership is coming to terms with the fact that rewards and recognition are not only about money. It is also about: Do you understand how I feel? That’s a question that has never been asked before,” she says.
But you can’t fix burnout with a band-aid—and certainly not with outdated HR playbooks and ignorant managers. According to Chandy, the real challenge for corporates lies in turning the lens inward—whether that means bringing organisational psychologists onboard as consultants to train their leaders to be empathetic managers or designing systems that tackle burnout with intention and care. “Often, traditional employee assistance programmes (EAP) come with a degree of suspicion where employees feel that the HR team is trying to get information out of them under the guise of helping them,” warns Chandy. She cites the example of their client Jio Hotstar, which offers employees access to two dedicated therapists. “In this scenario, HR is not involved in any way and staffers reach out directly to us from their corporate email. Even the reports that we send over highlight only two things: the number of sessions that have taken place every month and the trends that we think could indicate an organisational issue,” clarifies Chandy.
In that sense, psychologist-led interventions in corporate India are getting a structural glow-up. At Ramco Cements—another client on Chandy’s roster—employees can skip the awkward HR chat and go straight to the source: two in-house psychologists, just a click away. At Target, managers and employees are putting ‘therapy hours’ on calendars like it’s just another Zoom call—no stigma, no side-eye, just part of the new normal. And those taboo topics? Burnout, office crushes, workplace conflict, imposter syndrome? They’re being unpacked in monthly workshops led by psychologists who know how to talk about the hard stuff. Like Chandy points out, companies that embed this kind of support into the fabric of work see actual cultural shifts.
According to Suri, startups, especially founder-led ones, tend to move faster on mental well-being because their decision-makers have felt the pressure firsthand. She may as well be describing Elmer D’silva, the 39-year-old founder and CEO of Wrap2Earn, a technology-driven vehicle-advertising Mumbai startup, whose black labrador, Yoshi, holds court as its Chief Happiness Officer. Like Rahul Arepaka of Harvesting Robotics, whose viral post about their in-house golden retriever, won the internet, D’silva relies on his pet dog to do all the stress-busting work: “It’s amazing how much stress melts away with a wagging tail and a little playtime. Bringing Yoshi in every week helps create a warm, relaxed vibe—it reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously and that a joyful workplace is a better workplace,” adds D’silva. Clearly for many like him, joy at work doesn’t have to be optional anymore.
Whichever way you look, change is in the air. And this crack in the old-school mindset is worth noticing because it is driven by boardrooms starting to fuss as much about burnout as they do about the bottom line. As D’Mello notes, “In the end, our responsibility [as leaders] is not just to take care of ourselves. It is also to take care of each other.”
