BHIVE - Senior Vice President - People & Culture

Job Summary: The Senior Vice President - People & Culture will build the people function that enables the company to scale rapidly across multiple verticals and geographies, prepare the organisation for the governance and regulatory requirements of a public listing, and do both while nurturing the ownership-driven, high-performance culture that has made BHIVE what it is today. BHIVE has a strong execution culture. The leadership team values conviction, speed, attention to detail, and systems that scale without creating bottlenecks.
The Senior Vice President - People and Culture will be expected to build a function that operates with high autonomy: clear ownership, proactive early-warning systems, and outcomes-first reporting that closes loops rather than opens new ones.
Key Responsibilities:
1. IPO-Ready People Infrastructure
- Own ESOP communication and allocation to eligible employees across verticals once the framework is established by Finance and Legal. Ensure employees understand the value proposition, timelines, and vesting structures as a retention and alignment lever ahead of IPO.
- Build board-reportable people dashboards: attrition (segmented by vertical and level), cost per-hire, HRBP ratios, engagement scores, diversity metrics, and compliance status.
- Establish SEBI-compliant governance structures: insider trading policy, whistleblower framework, code of conduct, and disclosure protocols for a listed entity.
- Prepare all HR policies, contracts, and documentation for due diligence readiness. The people function must be audit-proof by Q2 FY27.
2. Multi-Vertical Workforce Strategy
- Own end-to-end people strategy across five distinct verticals: Workspace (operations + corporate), BHIVE Capital.
- Design differentiated talent strategies, compensation structures, and engagement models for each vertical. A community manager at a co-working centre and a fund analyst at BHIVE Capital are fundamentally different talent profiles.
- Build workforce planning models that account for BHIVE's aggressive expansion, including significant new capacity additions and new city entries on the roadmap.
3. Distributed Operations at Scale

- Design and deploy multi-location HR delivery across all BHIVE centres in Bengaluru, with plans for multi-city expansion.
- Own frontline workforce management: high-volume hiring, onboarding at scale, shift management, attrition containment for centre operations (community managers, front desk, housekeeping, F&B staff).
- Build robust compliance infrastructure: Shops & Establishments Act across all locations, contract labour regulations, PF/ESI, POSH at scale, and vendor/contract workforce governance.
- Establish standardized Minimum Standards checklists and SOPs that ensure consistent employee experience across every centre, independent of who manages it.
4. Culture Architecture
- Codify and protect BHIVE's existing culture: ownership over process, conviction over consensus, brand obsession, campus-community identity, and "Work Life Harmony" (not work-life balance).
- Design the cultural evolution roadmap as BHIVE transitions from a high-growth private company to a publicly listed, multi-vertical group, without losing what makes it distinctive.
- Build internal rituals, recognition frameworks, and communication architecture that reinforce these values at every level, from a barista at BHIVE Cafe to a VP at Workspace.
- Own employer brand strategy: position BHIVE as an employer of choice in Bengaluru's competitive talent market, competing against both co-working peers (WeWork India, Awfis, IndiQube) and the broader tech ecosystem.
5. Talent Acquisition & Leadership Pipeline
- Lead talent acquisition strategy across all verticals, with a focus on building a leadership bench that can scale with the business.
- Build succession plans for all critical roles. Excellence should be embedded in the system, not dependent on any single individual's presence.
- Design and execute a structured onboarding program that accelerates new hire productivity while immersing them in BHIVE's culture and brand identity.
- Strengthen the internal mobility framework: as BHIVE grows into new verticals and geographies, internal talent should be the first pipeline, not external hiring.
6. Performance, Rewards & Retention
- Establish a performance management system that drives accountability, continuous feedback, and high performance. No tolerance for ambiguity in who owns what.
- Design competitive compensation and benefits architecture benchmarked against industry, segmented by vertical and role type (operations vs. corporate vs. investment).
- Build ESOP communication strategy that makes equity ownership a genuine retention lever, not just a line item on the offer letter.
- Conduct regular compensation reviews to ensure internal equity and external competitiveness, partnering with Finance to align with business performance and IPO timeline.
7. Learning & Organisational Development
- Design structured leadership development programs that build the next layer of leaders BHIVE needs at scale.
- Create competency frameworks and career progression models for each vertical.
- Drive organisational design initiatives as BHIVE adds verticals, geographies, and complexity. The org structure that works today will need to evolve as the company scales across multiple cities.
- Lead AI readiness at the organisational level: build the policy framework for AI adoption, design reskilling initiatives for AI-augmented roles, and create workforce planning models that account for evolving human-AI collaboration across functions.
8. Change Management & CEO Partnership
- Lead change management for the private-to-public-company transition, the most significant cultural shift BHIVE will undergo.
- Serve as a trusted partner to the CEO on all people-related matters, progressively building the team and systems so that routine HR decisions are handled autonomously within the function.
- Build routing and ownership maps so that people issues land with the right owner without requiring senior leadership escalation. The goal is a self-routing system where the right person owns the right problem by default.
- Equip people managers with frameworks and tools to make decisions autonomously, reducing dependency on central HR for routine matters.
9. Compliance, Governance & Risk
- Ensure compliance across all applicable labour laws, statutory regulations, and industry standards for a multi-location, multi-entity, mixed-workforce (permanent + contract + vendor) organisation in Karnataka, and eventually across states.
- Establish HR governance frameworks that meet public company standards well ahead of IPO filing.
- Handle complex employee relations matters with fairness, speed, and legal precision.
- Proactively identify and mitigate HR-related risks before they surface. At BHIVE, prevention is valued over intervention.