Amrita Padda, Chief People Officer – Bharti Airtel, is a dynamic HR leader with over 21 years of experience across the entire spectrum of HR roles. In her previous experience in Unilever, she joined as a management trainee in 2000 and spent the first 14 years of her career based in India. During that time, she has supported many different teams in Hindustan Unilever Limited including marketing and supply chain and was the HR Transformation Lead throughout one of the most significant periods of transformation for the function.

Amrita was appointed as General Manager Marketing in 2011 where she led significant organization transformation across the Marketing teams in South Asia before taking up her first appointment in a global role as Human Resource Director Procurement in January 2015. In that time, she has many notable achievements including landing the Connected 4 Growth (C4G) Procurement organization, driving capability building and ways of working workshops for leadership teams globally and leading the delivery of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan for Procurement.

In 2017, Amrita was appointed as VPHR Philippines where she has played a very significant role in building business critical capabilities and accelerating local leadership pipeline. Amrita’s spirit of pioneering can be seen in the many business initiatives led by her – Laundromat business via a start-up, Service improvement via Agile methodology, setting up of the Omni-channel U-shop, and taking the lead in implementation of the Future of Work framework.

In her last role, as the Chief People Officer, Unilever Marketplace, a global business unit to help transform their distributive trade business, she was responsible for setting up the Organization and bringing in the leadership team for the business. In addition, she also held a global role as a cross functional team lead working with the Unilever CEOs office for COVID management. Here she was able to work through many complex challenges faced by the organization due to the global pandemic. Her experience of working in and leading global market teams and her collaborative approach has been of great value to Unilever as they navigated the various nuances of the impact of the pandemic.

Prior to her Post Graduation, she has a brief experience in the Hospitality industry, when she joined the Taj Group of Hotels as a Management Trainee. While she did not pursue that line of work for long, her love for food, the culinary arts, and service continues.

Amrita is married to Rakesh who works in banking and they have 2 boys Aadiv and Abeer.

She holds a Master’s degree in HR from XLRI, Jamshedpur and is a Hotel Management Graduate from Institute of Hotel Management, Pusa. She has also completed her of Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com) from University of Delhi