Collarless work
When the job outgrows the title — and the title keeps drawing a salary.
About · Work Observed
Work Observed lives in that gap — between the rules as drafted and the work as it behaves.
A working notebook, kept in public. The writing is about how labour, compliance, and capability behave inside real Indian organisations — not the policy-deck version, the Tuesday version.
The collar came off years ago. The org chart never got the memo.
Written by Jonas Prasanna — eighteen years into a career in people & culture that has run across the US, Asia and Australia, and through aerospace, consumer electronics, streaming and IT. He led HR for Boeing’s APAC defence business, with teams from Bengaluru to Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul; before that, the better part of a decade at Philips building talent and employer-brand practice, with stops at Capgemini and Hotstar along the way.
An IIM Kozhikode programme in human-resource management sits under it; a long habit of executive coaching and culture transformation runs through it — recognised by SHRM among India’s top voices in the field. The tools, like the Labour Codes Navigator, are the parts of the notebook that turned out useful to more than one person.
The territory
When the job outgrows the title — and the title keeps drawing a salary.
Careers that stopped being a single line on an org chart.
Why identical-sized teams deliver wildly different amounts.
The labour Codes as the floor everything is built on, not a tax.
For the record
Off the clock
A family in Hyderabad of small children and elders — its own daily lesson in capacity planning. A slow attempt at conversational Telugu. The hills above Munnar, returned to often enough to count as a habit. And a long interest in saying a true thing plainly, which is harder than it looks.