Payal AnandPayal Anand is an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Kozhikode, India. She has been affiliated with IIM Kozhikode since 2019. She has also taught at IIM Raipur and FLAME University Pune, at various levels. She has been awarded her PhD from IIM Indore. Her research interest mainly includes workplace loneliness, personality traits and emotions. Her work has been appreciated by the international journal of repute such as the International Journal of Human Resource Management and Journal of Knowledge Management. She is a recipient of the prestigious ‘The Michael Poole Highly Commended Award for the year 2019’. She is a certified personal profile analysis practitioner.

Born and brought up in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, she is still close to her roots. One thing that she recalls the most is the evening gatherings that family and friends used to have back then. She has some beautiful memories from her school that she still cherishes. She believes life is much beyond a routine of 9–6, which today’s youth needs to understand. She enjoys teaching a lot as this gives her the opportunity to stay connected with the younger generation and to be able to understand them better. In her classes, she attempts to create an environment of free speech and touches upon stigmatized issues or those considered taboo by the society.

She believes in gratefulness and trusts mother nature. She believes that humans, being dominant species, have responsibility to protect all the non-dominant species by taking care of them in all capacities. She has been an animal lover all her life. Her love for felines is known to many. She aspires to dedicate her life to educating people around the stigma attached with cats. In the long term, she plans to indulge in caring and nurturing all the needy cats out there who require human love and affection. In her free time, she enjoys gardening. She also loves the conversations, a mix of innocence and curiosity, she regularly has with her younger cousin. Payal is still in search of more things that mother nature has bestowed upon the earth, which gives her life more meaning and direction.