People, Power & Practice

  What our quarterly rewards system taught me about the real gap that frequent feedback doesn't close By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 “Feedback that doesn't wait twelve months to matter.” Source: [Nataliya Vaitkevich] Pexels (2021) We don't have an annual performance review problem, because we never really had an annual review. Feedback at Asia Pacific Group happens close to the moment it is earned, after a call, after a case closes, and every three months we formalize it with cash rewards and certificates for the people who consistently delivered. That rhythm maps almost exactly onto Kolb's (1984) learning cycle: a concrete experience (the client call, the visa decision), immediate reflection (informal feedback), a quarterly step back to form the bigger pattern, and staff testing what they learned in the next quarter's cases. An annual review completes this cycle once a year; ours completes it roughly four times, with a fast, informal loop running ...

  What reverse mentoring taught me about VAK learning styles and whether the model actually holds up By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 “New idea, no seniority required.” Source: [Pavel Danilyuk] Pexels (2021).  In our general meetings, everyone, new hire or ten-year veteran, is expected to bring an idea. That's how one of our newest, youngest staff members ended up teaching the rest of us a platform none of us had used before. She proposed it, management agreed to try it, and instead of a memo or a manual, we ran a couple of hands-on sessions where people actually logged in and used it themselves. It went well. Nobody was told how the platform worked; they were made to try it. Marcinkus Murphy (2012) calls this reverse mentoring: a junior employee acting as mentor to share updated expertise with senior colleagues, inverting the usual direction of teaching while also building the junior mentor's own leadership skills. What made ours work, though, may not have...

  What an accidental national experiment revealed about trust, recognition, and whether it can outlive the crisis By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 “A holiday nobody asked for still needed someone to prove it worked.” Source: [Alpha En], Pexels (2024). In March 2026, Sri Lanka mandated Wednesdays off for the public sector to conserve fuel during the regional energy crisis, urging private firms to consider following suit (Allwork.Space, 2026) . Asia Pacific Group chose to follow it, then went further on our own: Fridays became work-from-home too, since it was already our slowest day and sat closest to the weekend. Staff travelling from further districts worked from home, walk-in traffic slowed, and every client conversation that mattered still happened, just online. That the transition worked says less about Wednesdays and more about trust. Armstrong's (2011) L&D philosophy argues real organizational capability comes from empowerment rather than supervision, sel...

  What a registration surge taught me about systems thinking in HR and business development By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 “The numbers were visible days before the decision was made.” Source: [Rasiah Keerthana] (2026). Personal photograph. Asia Pacific Group, Havelock Mall, Colombo, Sri Lanka. After our recent education expo, registrations came in fast: genuine, motivated students, exactly what business development hopes for. But every file needs a properly reviewed Genuine Student Requirement statement and Statement of Purpose, too critical to risk loading onto the one person already handling applications. We knew within days we needed a dedicated GSR/SOP resource. The decision took three more days. The BDM view: the surge was visible the moment registrations came in, never a surprise, just arithmetic. The HR view: a staffing need only becomes real once it is formally raised, by which point the surge is already straining the team. Neither view is wrong, which i...

  What one departure taught me about trust, loyalty, and institutional memory in consulting By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 “The seat she left is still the one clients ask for.” Source: [Cottonbro Studio] Pexels (2021). Would you rehire someone who once walked away, not the one you were relieved to see leave, but the one whose absence you still feel every time a client mentions her name? One of our best consultants left Asia Pacific Group for a genuine personal reason, caring for a family member. She was not chasing a bigger salary and was not pushed out. What made it difficult was her relationships: clients asked for her by name, referred others to her, and every consultant since has quietly been compared to her. Garvin (1993) argues learning organizations are distinguished partly by their ability to learn from past experience, the Santayana principle that those who forget the past repeat it. Losing someone this good without considering whether the door should...

  What happens when the real bottleneck in consulting isn't judgement; it's follow-through By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 “Still done by hand — for now.” Source: [Rasiah Keerthana] (2026). Personal photograph. Asia Pacific Group, Kandy, Sri Lanka. Two things are true at Asia Pacific Group right now. One: everything is still manual; we check every profile ourselves; nothing is automated. Two: the biggest recurring problem isn't a bad decision; it's staff simply forgetting. A task gets assigned, marked urgent with a clear deadline, and still gets missed. We call to follow up, and the answer is simply, “I forgot.” That is a workflow-memory problem, exactly what agentic AI is built to remove. Generative AI drafts something when asked; agentic AI plans and executes a workflow autonomously, without a human needing to remember it (Aisera, 2026) . Sri Lankan HR functions are only beginning to apply this structurally (Business News LK, 2026) , and firms stil...

  What one Australian visa case taught me about the real cost and value of staying calm for a living By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 “The calm voice on the call is rarely the whole story.” Source: [Vitaly Gariev], Pexels (2026). A client applying for her daughter's Australian student visa wanted us to call immigration directly and speed up the decision, something no agency can actually do. She was angry, openly doubted our competence, and some of my staff took the brunt of it in words far from professional. We stayed calm, understanding the process well enough to know that getting defensive would only escalate things. Three weeks later, the visa was granted. She apologized and returned to process her son's visa with us as well. That calm has a name. Hochschild (1983) called it emotional labor, managing your own feelings to produce the composed display a job requires, regardless of what you feel underneath. Himanthi and Arachchige (2014) , studying Sri Lankan ...

  Why is artificial intelligence in hiring exciting, dangerous, and everything HR needs to be paying attention to right now? By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 AI does not read between the lines. It reads the data, and only the data. In an industry built on human stories, that gap is bigger than most people think. Source: [Cottonbro Studio], Pexels (2020) The Algorithm Does Not Know Your Student’s Story Platforms like ApplyBoard already use AI to screen student profiles and match them to university requirements. It is fast and removes hours of manual work. But what happens to the student whose overall GPA looks weak, yet whose individual subject marks tell a completely different story? A human consultant reads that transcript differently, going beyond the overall GPA to review individual subject marks, and considering the student’s own Statement of Purpose to understand their motivation and context. An algorithm flags a weak number and moves on. A consultant sees ...

Why motivating Gen Z demands a completely different playbook, and why most Sri Lankan firms haven’t written it yet By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 A disengaged employee is not always the one walking out the door; sometimes they are sitting right in front of you. Source: [Ron Lach], Pexels (2026) The Hardest Employee to Manage Is Not the One Who Leaves It is the one who stays, but stopped caring the moment nobody noticed their work. In education and migration consulting, where every client interaction matters and every visa file carries real consequences, a disengaged consultant is not just an HR problem. It is a business risk. And in 2026, disengagement among young workers is reaching levels no manager can afford to ignore. Gen Z, now 30% of the global workforce, has an average early-career job tenure of just 1.1 years (Randstad, 2025) . But the ones who stay without motivation are often more damaging than the ones who leave. They Did Not Arrive Difficult. They Arrived...

The Retention Crisis Inside Sri Lanka's Education & Migration Consulting Industry By Rasiah Keerthana | MBA Batch 37 | Jul 2026 Education and migration consulting, a high-demand, high-pressure industry. Source: [RUT MIIT], Unsplash (2021). Let’s Be Honest About This Industry Working in education and migration consulting in Sri Lanka right now is one of the most rewarding and most exhausting things a person can do. We are in the business of changing lives, helping students find pathways abroad, guiding families through life-defining decisions, and navigating an immigration landscape that shifts faster than most people can keep up with. But if we are being honest, there is a question we rarely ask out loud: who is looking after the people doing all of this? Because right now, across the industry, the answer is not many. Sri Lanka’s economic crisis changed everything. The statistics below tell part of the story, but behind every number is a consulting firm scrambling to m eet surg...