People Strategy and Culture
At Cube InvIT, our people strategy is integral to our long-term growth agenda and operating philosophy. As the organization continues to scale its platform, strengthen asset performance, and move towards a more technology-driven and analytics-led operating model, our HR agenda remains focused on building a high-performance, future-ready and values-led organization.
During the year, we continued to invest in people practices that support business growth, leadership depth, operational excellence, employee engagement, diversity and inclusion, digital enablement, and long-term value creation. These initiatives are anchored in our core values of Excellence, Safety, Sustainability, Innovation, Integrity, and Valuing Every Individual.
Aligned with the Annual Report theme of “Scaling with Discipline, Growing with Conviction,” our people priorities were organized around three strategic pillars
Culture
Building a High-Trust, Inclusive and Performance-Driven Organization
Culture at Cube Highways is not viewed as a standalone people agenda, but as a core enabler of business performance. With a geographically distributed workforce across corporate offices, SPVs, toll operations, maintenance teams and project locations, we continued to strengthen a culture of trust, accountability, inclusion, performance orientation and shared ownership.
Our focus during the year was to reinforce employee voice, institutionalize meritocracy, build inclusion, strengthen workplace governance, and recognize contributions across levels and locations.
Sustaining a High-Trust Workplace
Cube Highways continued to demonstrate its commitment to building a high-trust and high-performance workplace, receiving the Great Place to Work® Certification for the third consecutive year. This milestone reflects the confidence, pride, and engagement of our employees, and reinforces the organization’s continued focus on listening to employees and acting on feedback.
The engagement survey witnessed over 95% participation, reflecting strong employee involvement across functions, entities, and locations. The improvement in Trust Index scores across key assets further demonstrates the impact of structured engagement, leadership connect, and action planning interventions.
The certification is not viewed merely as a recognition, but as an ongoing journey of building credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie across the organization.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion remain integral to Cube Highways’ culture and long-term business sustainability. We are committed to fostering a workplace that is inclusive, equitable and respectful—where every individual feels valued, empowered and able to contribute meaningfully.
Our DEI agenda focuses on building diverse talent pipelines, ensuring fairness in opportunity and rewards, enabling open dialogue, and strengthening representation across levels. During the year, we continued to advance this agenda through structured initiatives and governance mechanisms.
We were awarded Aon’s Gender Pay Equity Certification, recognizing Cube Highways’ commitment to addressing pay inequalities and sustaining equitable compensation practices. The study conducted as part of this certification reflects our intentional focus on building an inclusive workforce and reinforcing equitable pay practices.
The organization also continued to conduct the Quarterly Women’s Circle, providing a structured platform for dialogue, peer learning, leadership visibility, and discussion on matters relevant to women employees. These forums are designed to strengthen inclusion, enable shared learning, and foster a stronger sense of belonging.
As part of our efforts to build a more diverse leadership pipeline, the Women Leadership Program 2025 was conducted in partnership with an external expert platform. The program included 7 selected women participants and focused on leadership development, confidence building, career ownership and future readiness.
Beyond corporate offices, the organization also continued to encourage women’s participation across operational roles. Key DEI indicators during the year included 30% women representation at corporate offices, 16 women employees promoted, deployment of 116 women toll collectors across 9 projects, and participation of women employees across SPVs in roles such as security guards, lane supervisors and in-house labor. Female labor participation across assets, particularly in right-of-way maintenance activities, further reflects the organization’s continued efforts to strengthen inclusion across the operating footprint.
Workplace Safety, Respect and PoSH Governance
A safe, respectful and inclusive workplace is foundational to our people philosophy. During the year, the organization continued to strengthen PoSH governance and awareness through periodic sensitization sessions for employees and focused capability-building interventions for its Internal Committee members.
Periodic PoSH awareness sessions were conducted for employees across locations, reinforcing expected workplace behaviors, reporting mechanisms, and the organization’s zero-tolerance approach towards harassment. IC members were also covered through focused sessions to strengthen awareness, governance readiness and procedural understanding.
The organization’s recognition among India’s Top 25 Safest Workplaces at the Kelp PoSH Awards 2026 further reinforces the strength of its workplace safety, respect and governance agenda.
Performance, Rewards and Recognition
Cube InvIT performance and rewards philosophy is anchored in meritocracy, transparency and alignment with business outcomes. The Performance Management System is based on the Balanced Scorecard framework, ensuring that individual goals are aligned with organizational priorities across business, compliance, process, technology, innovation, people, and culture dimensions.
The performance cycle begins with robust KRA-based goal planning across all levels. This is supported by periodic reviews and structured performance conversations, enabling timely feedback, course correction, and alignment between individual contribution and business objectives.
As part of the annual appraisal process, performance against KRAs is reviewed through structured performance dialogues. To ensure performance differentiation and consistency in assessment, the organization follows a bell curve approach for rating and stacking employees.
The Total Rewards framework reinforces meritocracy through annual increments, performance-linked bonuses, and Long-Term Incentive Plans for eligible roles. Promotions are governed by role availability, capability readiness and sustained superior performance, ensuring that career progression is aligned with both individual contribution and organizational need.
Recognition continues to be an important lever for strengthening appreciation and motivation. The organization’s recognition ecosystem includes Pat on the Back, and SPV Excellence Awards, each designed to recognize individual, team and operational excellence across the organization.
Together, these practices reinforce a culture of accountability, appreciation, high performance and long-term ownership.
Capability
Building a Future-Ready Workforce for Growth and Transformation
As Cube Highways moves towards a more technology-driven and analytics-led operating model, the organization is prioritizing capabilities that will enable future growth, operational excellence and digital transformation. Our capability agenda focuses on strengthening technical depth, data literacy, digital fluency, leadership effectiveness, managerial capability, innovation mindset, and readiness for scale. The emphasis is on building a workforce that can combine domain expertise with analytical thinking, technology adoption and collaborative execution. During the year, Cube Highways invested in structured learning and development interventions across levels, including new joiners, individual contributors, people managers, women leaders and senior leadership.
Tech Pathshala – Strengthening Technical and Domain Capability
Tech Pathshala continued to serve as a key platform for technical capability building. Delivered through internal subject matter experts, the initiative supports knowledge sharing and capability enhancement across highways engineering, operations, maintenance, safety, asset management and related functional areas. The program is designed to deepen domain capability, improve operational understanding, and enable employees to learn from internal expertise and real-life business contexts. During the year, the organization executed quarterly training calendars and delivered multiple sessions across relevant technical areas. By institutionalizing internal knowledge sharing, Tech Pathshala strengthens operational excellence and builds a stronger technical foundation across the organization.
CubeLead – Building People Manager Effectiveness
People managers play a critical role in translating organizational priorities into team outcomes. Recognizing this, Cube Highways implemented CubeLead, a structured people manager development journey focused on strengthening managerial effectiveness. The program covered 2 cohorts of people managers and was supported by diagnostic insights, blended learning, coaching, and action-oriented development. The diagnostic assessment witnessed approximately 95% participation, reflecting strong engagement and readiness among managers to invest in their development. CubeLead focused on core people management capabilities such as goal setting, performance conversations, coaching, feedback, team engagement, collaboration and accountability. Through a structured development journey, the program aims to strengthen managers as enablers of performance, engagement and culture.
Margdarshan – Executive Leadership Development
Leadership depth is central to Cube Highways’ ability to scale with conviction and grow with direction. During the year, the organization implemented Margdarshan, an executive leadership development and coaching initiative for senior leaders. The flagship cohort covered CXOs, with each leader undergoing a structured leadership journey comprising assessment, feedback, personalized coaching and Individual Development Planning. Each participant completed 6 structured coaching sessions, and the program achieved 100% completion. Margdarshan was designed to enhance self-awareness, strategic leadership effectiveness, stakeholder influence, decision-making, enterprise thinking and succession readiness. The initiative reflects the organization’s commitment to building leadership capability for current and future business needs.
Prarambh – Structured Induction and Onboarding
A strong onboarding experience is critical to early engagement, assimilation, and productivity. Prarambh, Cube Highways’ structured onboarding and induction program, continued to provide new joiners with a comprehensive three-month integration journey. The program includes HR-led onboarding, joining formalities, functional orientation, on-the-job exposure, departmental connects and leadership interactions. During the year, 240+ employees were onboarded, with over with 99% positive feedback on the onboarding experience. Prarambh enables new employees to understand the organization’s business, values, culture, operating model and expectations, thereby accelerating their integration into the workplace.
Digital Enablement and Future Skills
In line with Cube Highways’ digital transformation agenda, the HR function continues to strengthen technology-enabled learning and data-led people practices. The organization is progressing towards a scalable and integrated learning ecosystem that can support personalized learning, wider reach, improved tracking and stronger analytics. Future workforce capabilities being prioritized include data literacy, analytics-led decision-making, digital fluency, automation orientation, technology adoption, advanced engineering capability, stakeholder management, innovation mindset and leadership agility. The organization also continues to provide aspect-wise trainings to employees, contractors and workers based on applicability, business need and role relevance. This ensures that capability building remains inclusive and aligned to the realities of both corporate and operational environments.
Connect
The organization continued to foster employee voice through structured engagement platforms, leadership connects, and feedback mechanisms. These platforms enable dialogue between employees and leaders, support continuous improvement in workplace experience, and help translate employee feedback into meaningful action. Through engagement surveys, leadership interactions, focus groups and action planning, Cube Highways continues to strengthen trust, transparency and connect across the workforce. At Cube Highways, employee connect is central to sustaining engagement across a diverse and distributed workforce. During the year, the organization continued to build platforms that bring employees together, strengthen belonging, encourage participation, and support holistic well-being. Our approach to connect goes beyond events. It is about creating meaningful touchpoints that help employees feel heard, valued, recognized, supported and connected to the larger purpose of the organization.
Cube Talent Championship – Celebrating Employee Expression
The Cube Talent Championship provided employees a platform to showcase their creativity, talent and interests beyond the workplace. The initiative encouraged participation across categories and strengthened employee engagement through performance, voting, and organization-wide involvement. Such platforms help create a vibrant workplace culture by recognizing employees not only for their work contributions but also for their individuality, creativity and passion.
Kutumb – Building Community and Belonging
Kutumb, the organization’s annual employee engagement platform, continued to reinforce camaraderie, collaboration and belonging across teams. Designed as an employee get-together initiative across corporate offices and SPVs, Kutumb reflects the organization’s belief in building a workplace community that extends beyond formal work structures. Through structured engagement activities, Kutumb provides employees an opportunity to connect, celebrate, collaborate and strengthen interpersonal relationships across locations and functions.
Cube@10 – Celebrating a Decade of Excellence
FY 2026 marked an important milestone as Cube Highways celebrated its 10th anniversary through the Cube@10 celebrations. The milestone brought together employees across locations to commemorate the organization’s journey, recognize contributions, and reinforce shared pride and purpose. The celebrations engaged 540+ employees, with strong participation across locations and entities. Cube@10 served as a powerful reminder of the organization’s journey, achievements and collective aspirations for the future.
Conclusion
As Cube Highways continues its journey of transformation and growth, our people remain at the core of our strategy. We are building a resilient, inclusive and future-ready organization—one that combines strong cultural foundations with evolving capabilities and deep employee connect. Our continued investments in leadership development, capability building, performance management, digital enablement, inclusive practices, employee well-being and engagement reflect a deliberate and directional approach to growth. As we scale new heights, we remain committed to nurturing a workplace where talent thrives, leaders emerge, and every individual contributes meaningfully to sustainable long-term value creation.
Sustainable Procurement, Supply Chain and Asset Stewardship
Sustainable and Responsible Sourcing
Cube InvIT has scaled up integration of sustainability into procurement through responsible sourcing, life cycle-based decision-making, and supplier engagement practices that support operational resilience and long-term value creation. Vendor selection is supported by structured due diligence processes, local sourcing preference, use of recycled and low-carbon materials, and verification of relevant certifications where applicable.
Supplier Code of Conduct
Supplier onboarding and monitoring are supported by evolving digital systems to strengthen transparency and performance tracking. All suppliers are required to adhere to defined ESG standards covering:
- Labor and human rights compliance
- Health and safety standards
- Environmental impact mitigation
- Anti-Corruption and ethical conduct
Customer Experience
Cube InvIT continues to focus on enhancing road quality, commuter safety, and travel convenience across its portfolio. Regular operations and maintenance support smooth traffic movement and improved driving conditions for road users. Multiple user-focused measures such as road safety initiatives, traffic management systems, illumination improvements, emergency response mechanisms, and grievance redressal processes have been implemented to strengthen commuter safety and responsiveness. In addition, technology-enabled systems including digital tolling, monitoring platforms, and automated operational controls are being leveraged to improve operational efficiency, reduce congestion, and enhance overall user experience across assets.
