As Chief Human Resources Officer at Ncell, Afreen Huda is shaping the future of one of Nepal’s most admired brands, Ncell, by building a workplace where people are empowered to thrive, innovate, and create meaningful impact. She is driving a people-first agenda to strengthen and establish Ncell as an agile, inclusive, and purpose-driven workplace where people and business grow together.
Guided by Ncell’s core values and purpose, she continues to strengthen Ncell’s position as one of Nepal’s leading employer brands, where people are inspired to learn, lead, and make a meaningful impact. The HRM Nepal caught up with Huda to lean wide range of issues on Ncell’s people management strategy and motivating and ergonomic workplace environment management. Excerpts.
Q: Could you briefly introduce yourself and outline your professional journey in human resource management?
A: I am the Chief Human Resources Officer at Ncell, where I lead the people agenda for one of Nepal’s largest private-sector employers and among the country’s most significant foreign direct investments with contributions of approximately Rs. 375 billion taxes and fees. My career in human resources has spanned close to two decades, moving across generalist and specialist roles — from Employee Engagement and Culture Management in my early years to organisational design, total rewards, and finally the full breadth of a chief people officer’s mandate. I have had the privilege of working in fast-moving, technology-led environments, which have shaped my conviction that HR is not a support function sitting on the sidelines but a genuine business partner.
What I value most about this journey is that it has never been linear or purely administrative; every role forced me to understand the commercial engine of the business first and then ask how our people strategy could power it. That perspective is what I bring to Ncell today. At Ncell, I have the privilege of leading the people strategy of a company widely recognised as Nepal’s No. 1 employer brand, where our purpose is to help liberate people by inspiring everyone to grow together.
Q: Human resources is often perceived as an administrative or routine function. What inspired you to pursue a career in HR, and what has kept you motivated throughout your professional journey?
A: I was drawn to HR precisely because I disagreed with that perception. Very early on I realised that every strategy a company writes – however brilliant on paper – is executed by people, and that the quality of an organisation’s talent decisions ultimately determines whether it wins or loses. This is exactly where Ncell’s core values – One Company One Team, Customers at our Heart, Exceptional Performance, Uncompromising Integrity and Breakthrough Innovation resonates with my thought process. HR is all about enabling people to succeed in what they do. That is not merely administrative work; that is strategy.
What inspired me was the opportunity to sit at the intersection of business ambition and human potential. What has kept me motivated is watching that intersection produce real outcomes: a Management Trainee getting groomed from operational level to tactical strategy level of the organisation, a team that turns around its engagement scores, a policy change that lets more women build careers. In a market like Nepal, where so much talent has historically looked abroad for opportunity, being able to build meaningful careers at home is deeply motivating. The administrative view of HR is a historically socialised perception. We are working towards evolving in line with modern HR, which is about shaping culture, capability, and competitiveness, and that is endlessly energising.
Q: How does Ncell align its HR strategy with its broader business objectives while ensuring high levels of employee engagement and satisfaction?
A: The single most important principle I adhere to is our strategy that is set by the board along with our executive leadership, which I am an integral part of, and it defines where we are going as a business – on network quality, customer experience, digital services, and financial resilience. The HR strategy does not exist independently of that; it is derived from it. But I would go further: it is not only HR that translates the corporate strategy into a functional plan. In line with our core values – One Company One Team, every function – technology, commercial, finance, regulatory – builds its own strategy to realise the company strategy.
HR, at Ncell, is not an ancillary function but the core. And as a core unit our role is to ensure that all of those functional strategies are resourced with the right people, the right capabilities, and the right culture. So, we begin each planning cycle by introspecting, “What must the business achieve, and what does that demand of our people?” From hunting people to onboarding and grooming to meet the evolving needs Ncell has set procedure and a team well equipped to navigate right direction to align perfectly well to meet the company objectives. From there we build workforce plans, capability roadmaps, and talent requirements that ladder directly up to our business goals.
Engagement follows naturally when employees can see the line of sight between their daily work and the company’s direction. We reinforce that with regular engagement, transparent communication, and a governance discipline that ensures we act on what employees tell us rather than simply surveying them. Apart from this, we engage our employees in not just day-to-day work-related activities. To build a healthy working environment we continuously work together with cross-functional teams and initiate team building exercises where all of us at Ncell come together to celebrate our achievements, learn and connect.
Q: To what extent is the HR function involved in strategic decision-making within Ncell? Does HR have a seat at the executive decision-making table?
A: Yes, HR has a full seat at the executive table and I report to the chief executive officer as a member of the leadership team. Our people are always our top-most priority in all the decision-making processes. A seat at the table is only meaningful if it comes with both a strategic voice and governance responsibility, and this is where I believe the balance really matters. On the strategy side, HR is involved from the outset in decisions on organisational structure, workforce sizing, succession, and the capability implications of any new business direction. When Ncell considers a shift in its commercial or technology strategy, the people cost and people readiness of that shift are discussed in the same room, at the same time, not bolted on afterwards.
On the governance side, HR carries real accountability: for fair and compliant employment practices, for pay equity, for ethical conduct, for protecting the company and its people through sound policy. A telecom company operating as a major FDI in Nepal sits under significant public and regulatory scrutiny, so governance is not a constraint on strategy – it is what makes the strategy credible and sustainable. My job is to hold both: to be commercially ambitious and institutionally responsible at once. And this is what makes Ncell one of the most desired places to work in Nepal.
Q: How challenging is talent acquisition in Nepal’s current labour market, particularly for highly skilled and specialised roles?
A: It is genuinely challenging, and I do not want to understate it. As of now we roughly have 480 employees. Indirectly, Ncell has provided job opportunities to more than 100,000 individuals through its robust nationwide channels. Nepal produces capable graduates, but the pipeline for highly specialised, experienced talent – in areas such as advanced network engineering, cybersecurity, data science, and enterprise digital product management – is thin. Part of the reason is structural: a very large share of our skilled and semi-skilled workforce migrates abroad for work, and the demographic dividend the country should be enjoying is leaking out through that migration.
When you are hiring for a niche technical role, you are often competing not just with other Nepali employers but with employers in the Gulf, Australia, Europe and America and beyond. For those specialised positions we therefore cannot rely only on buying talent from the market; we have to build it. That means investing heavily in developing people internally, partnering with universities, offering the kind of career progression and learning that persuades ambitious Nepalis that they can build a world-class career without leaving the country.
For scarce roles, our employer brand and our reputation for developing people are as important as compensation. If you look at Ncell, the employee turnaround is nominal compared to market standards. And that is because we believe in tapping into right talent and working together to develop their skills and expertise to match up to company needs.
Q: Given the relatively high employee turnover in some sectors, do organisations generally recover their investment in recruitment and selection before employees leave? How do you assess this balance?
A: This is an important question and the honest answer is that many organisations in Nepal do not fully recover that investment, particularly in high-churn sectors. Recruitment and selection are only the visible costs; the larger investment is in onboarding, training, and the time it takes for a new hire to reach full productivity. If someone leaves within the first year or two, much of that has not yet paid back. The way I would assess the balance is to look beyond cost-per-hire to the total lifecycle value of an employee – how long they stay, how productive they become, and what they contribute to institutional knowledge.
At Ncell our intended approach is to protect that investment at both ends: to hire more deliberately so that we select people whose aspirations genuinely fit the roles and the culture, and then to give them compelling reasons to stay through development, meaningful work, and career pathways. Retention is not just an HR metric; it is a financial one. Every avoidable exit is a write-off of capability the company has already paid to build, so we manage it with the same rigour we apply to any other capital investment.
Q: The IT and telecommunications sectors are often recognised for having robust performance management systems (PMS). What performance management practices does Ncell employ to enhance employee performance, engagement and satisfaction?
A: Our performance management philosophy starts, again, with cascade and alignment. Corporate objectives set by leadership are translated into functional objectives, and functional objectives into individual goals, so that every employee’s targets can be traced back to the company’s strategy. We use a structured goal-setting and review cycle with clear, measurable objectives agreed at the start of the year, mid-year recalibration, and a year-end assessment that considers both what was delivered and how it was delivered – results and attributes together.
Critically, we are working to shift performance management away from being a once-a-year, backward-looking event and towards being a continuous, forward-looking conversation between managers and their teams. At Ncell, we are aiming to link performance transparently to rewards, recognition, and development, because employees need to trust that the system is fair and consequential. Good performance management, done well, is one of the most powerful engagement tools an organisation has, because people are most satisfied when they know what is expected of them, receive honest feedback, and see their contribution recognised.
Q: In your view, which factors have the greatest influence on employee satisfaction: hygiene factors or motivational factors? How does Ncell strike the right balance between the two?
A: Herzberg’s framework holds up well in practice. Hygiene factors – competitive pay, benefits, job security, working conditions, sound policies – do not by themselves create satisfaction, but their absence reliably creates dissatisfaction. You cannot motivate people whose basic needs and sense of fairness are unmet. So, we treat hygiene factors as the non-negotiable foundation: we internally benchmark our compensation and benefits, we maintain fair and transparent policies, and we provide a safe, modern working environment. But once those foundations are secure, the factors that truly drive engagement and retention are the motivational ones – brand anyone aspires to work for, meaningful work, recognition, achievement, responsibility, and above all career development.
In the Nepali context this matters enormously, because the ambitious professionals most likely to leave the country are precisely those seeking growth and challenge, not merely a paycheque. I am proud to say that Ncell is one of the most aspired brands in Nepal that people want to associate with and this sets the benchmark in the market in terms of employee satisfaction. Our balance, therefore, is to get the hygiene factors unambiguously right so that they never become a source of grievance, and then to compete and win on the motivational factors – giving people real ownership, visible recognition, and a career worth staying for.
Q: Could you briefly explain the Human Resource Information System currently used by Ncell, to the extent that you are able to share?
A: Ncell operates on an integrated, enterprise-grade HRIS that serves as the single source of truth for our people data across the employee lifecycle. Without going into vendor specifics, the platform brings together core HR administration – employee records, organisational structure, leave and attendance – with the more strategic modules: recruitment and onboarding, goal-setting and performance management, learning and development, and compensation. The value of an integrated system is not simply digitisation for its own sake; it is meant to provide us with reliable, real-time data to make better decisions. From a governance standpoint, a well-controlled HRIS is essential for data privacy, audit readiness, and consistency of policy applications which for an organisation of our scale and public profile is not optional.
Q: Many organisations still struggle to develop a strong feedback culture within their performance management systems. What is your assessment of this issue, and how has Ncell addressed it?
A: I agree that this is one of the hardest cultural challenges, and it is particularly acute in South Asian workplaces where hierarchy and deference can make candid, upward, and even peer feedback uncomfortable. A performance system is only as good as the quality and honesty of the conversations happening inside it, and too many organisations have sophisticated forms but shallow dialogue. Our approach has been to treat feedback as a capability to be built, not a box to be ticked. We invest in equipping managers to give feedback that is specific, timely, balanced, and developmental rather than purely evaluative. We are aiming to attain more frequent check-ins so that feedback becomes routine rather than a dreaded annual verdict.
Culture change here is gradual and depends heavily on leaders modelling the behaviour themselves. When employees see that honest feedback is welcomed and leads to change, trust grows and the culture strengthens. Moreover, as a leading multinational in Nepal with strong employee retention, cross-cultural values, free and open environments for conversation the culture of listening out is built-in among all the employees. And this culture helps new joiners to adapt in no time helping us become an institution that actually listens.
Q: Some employers report an increasing number of ‘won’t do’ issues, particularly among younger employees. Have you encountered this trend? If so, what organisational policies or management approaches do you believe are most effective in addressing it?
A: I would gently reframe what is sometimes labelled a ‘won’t do’ attitude. Younger employees today, and this is true in Nepal as much as anywhere, are not less willing to work; they are less willing to work without understanding why. They want purpose, transparency, flexibility, and respect, and they will disengage from tasks that feel arbitrary or from management styles that rely on authority alone. So yes, we encounter the trend, but I see it less as a deficiency in the generation and more as a signal that traditional command-and-control management no longer works. The most effective responses in my experience are about leadership, not just policy: explaining the ‘why’ behind the work, giving young employees genuine responsibility early, providing frequent feedback and coaching, and offering flexibility where the work allows. The far larger opportunity is to adapt how we lead, because this generation, well engaged, is ambitious, digitally fluent, and exactly the talent that a modern telecom needs.
Q: How does Ncell identify employees’ learning and development needs? Are training opportunities allocated primarily on the basis of competency gaps and business requirements, or is there a broader developmental approach?
A: We are trying to use both lenses deliberately, and the balance between them reflects the governance-and-strategy discipline I keep returning to. The first lens is business-driven and rigorous: we identify the specific capabilities required by the company’s strategy, such as emerging technologies or digital services, assess where our current workforce stands relative to those requirements, and target learning interventions to close those exact competency gaps. This is where learning investment is most tightly linked to business need and where we hold ourselves accountable for return.
The second lens is broader and developmental: we invest in leadership development, succession readiness, and the all-round growth of high-potential employees, because not every valuable capability can be mapped to an immediate gap. Development needs surface through the performance management cycle, through succession and talent reviews, and through direct conversations between managers and employees about aspirations. In a talent-scarce market where buying skills externally is difficult and where we want to give Nepali professionals a reason to build their careers here, this dual approach – fixing today’s gaps while growing tomorrow’s leaders – is not a luxury; it is a competitive necessity.
Q: Nepal’s national agenda for human resource development to harness the demographic dividend appears to have lost momentum. In your opinion, what implications could this have for organisations and the labour market over the medium and long term?
A: This concerns me deeply, and it should concern every employer in the country. Nepal is in a demographic window that will not stay open forever – a large working-age population that, if educated, skilled, and productively employed, could transform the economy. Estimates suggest the country needs to create millions of new jobs in the coming decades simply to absorb its young workforce. Yet, the national HRD agenda has lost momentum, skills development has not kept pace with market needs, and the result is a paradox: employers struggle to find specialised talent at home while hundreds of thousands of young Nepalis leave every year for work abroad. If this is not reversed, the medium-term implications are a persistent skills mismatch, rising wage pressure for scarce specialised roles, and continued dependence on remittances rather than domestic productivity.
Over the long term, an unharnessed demographic dividend becomes a demographic burden as the population ages without having built its productive base. For organisations, the lesson is that we cannot wait for the state alone to solve this. Employers like Ncell must become part of the solution – through university partnerships, internships, apprenticeships, and serious internal capability building – because the talent ecosystem we invest in today is the one we will hire from tomorrow.
Q: As one of Nepal’s largest foreign direct investment companies, Ncell has contributed significantly to the development of professional HR practices and human capital. Looking back, what do you consider to be Ncell’s most significant contributions to human resource management in Nepal?
A: Ncell’s contribution goes well beyond the connectivity we provide. Ncell is one of the largest tax paying institutions in Nepal that has contributed around Rs. 375 billion in taxes and fees to the government of Nepal. Since its inception, Ncell’s contribution accounts for roughly 1.6% of the country’s GDP. As one of the largest FDI companies and taxpayers in Nepal, we helped bring international standards of professional management into the local market at a time when they were still uncommon. I would highlight a few contributions in particular.
First, we have tried to professionalise HR itself – introducing structured talent acquisition, merit-based performance management, transparent reward systems, and modern HRIS-driven practices that have since influenced expectations across the sector. Second, we built human capital: thousands of Nepali professionals have been trained and developed to international standards at Ncell, and many have gone on to lead in other organisations, so our impact multiplies well beyond our own walls. Third, we demonstrated that a company can be both commercially ambitious and strongly governed – that you can grow aggressively while upholding fair employment, compliance, diversity, and ethical conduct.
And finally, we have shown that world-class careers can be built inside Nepal, offering a home-grown alternative to migration for ambitious talent. If I were to look back with pride at anything, it is that Ncell has helped raise the bar for what good people management looks like in this country and our responsibility now is to keep raising it.
