Nirmala Menon: Nirmala Menon, Founder and CEO of Interweave Consulting, is an HR professional with global experience of over 30 years across multiple industries. Educated in India and the US, combined with her exposure to international work experience has made D&I a personal area of interest. Her last corporate job was with IBM as the Employee Relations and Diversity leader for India where she gained wide and varied experience in the area of Diversity and Inclusion Management, including opportunities to work on and facilitate interventions in several locations – Asia Pacific region, Ireland, Canada, Mexico and the United States. 

Nirmala is listed as a Subject Matter Expert by SHRM India and is an active member of Nasscom’s D&I Steering Committee. She was also a representative in the informal international advisory group of the UN Global Compact & the UNIFEM to finalise the Women’s Empowerment Principles. An alumnus of XLRI India, Nirmala holds an additional masters in HR from Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. Nirmala is also a certified coach from the International Coaching Academy.

Veena Gopalakrishnan: Veena Gopalakrishnan is an employment law partner at AZB & Partners and is based out of Bangalore. She focuses on providing strategic and practical counsel to employers across industries on a wide range of issues pertaining to Indian employment law, keeping in mind rapidly evolving workplace dynamics.  A significant portion of the practise is focused on assisting employers mitigate risks of litigation and ensuring compliance with Indian law. She regularly advises clients on complex employment law issues pertaining to workforce structuring, senior managerial exits, reductions in force, closures, employee transfers, integrations pursuant to corporate transactions and cross-border employee benefits. 

Being a strong advocate of inclusion, she has also been actively involved in advisory pertaining to workplace harassment, legal aspects of diversity and inclusiveness, including drafting and reviewing employment policies and educating employers on their duties and obligations in this respect.  She has assisted several clients on responding to and redressing issues pertaining to workplace sexual harassment, particularly pursuant to the #metoo movement in India.

Veena has been chosen as the exclusive winner of the Client Choice Award, 2019, presented by International Law Office in partnership with Lexology, for the Employment and Benefits category for India.  Veena was conferred the Women Super Achiever Award in February 2017 by the World HRD Congress, a forum for human resource professionals.

Ruchira Gokhale: is a Certified Diversity Professional and a qualified Human Resource specialist with a career spanning eighteen years. She brings operational as well as leadership expertise in the area of Talent Management and Business Partnering. A science graduate with a post-graduate degree in Human Resource from Pune University, a large part of her career has been with Organizations such as Thermax and Cummins.

Her last corporate stint with Cummins allowed for working across geographies, leading high visibility projects, completing a Six Sigma Green Belt Certification and getting engaged in the Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) agenda. For over half a decade, she has been consulting exclusively in the space of Diversity and Inclusion, thus building a specialization in designing and delivering sensitization workshops and other interventions which deal with Diversity and Inclusion, Gender Competence, LGBT+ Inclusion, Inter-Generational Intelligence, Prevention of Sexual Harassment (P.O.S.H.) at the workplace. Her work in the area of D&I as well as P.O.S.H. spans across a variety of Organizations – Vodafone, Amazon, ONGC, RBS, Bank of America, TATA, PRAJ, Kotak Securities, Volvo, Cleartrip, VMware to name a few. A trained and experienced Investigator in reports relating to Ethics and Sexual Harassment at the workplace, Ruchira is also equipped to provide guidance on matters relating to the formation and functioning of the Internal Committee.