Research on how identity, culture, and organizational systems shape performance sits behind every engagement Dr. Aditi Raghuram takes on. With individuals, that means treating leadership and wellbeing as a single problem. With organizations, it means identifying the people issues driving engagement, motivation, burnout, and performance, then building the strategy to fix them.
Dr. Raghuram holds a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Houston. Her doctoral research examined how dissimilarity, differences in identity, background, or circumstance, affects performance, finding that engagement was the mechanism connecting the two. That question has anchored her work ever since.
Since 2023, Dr. Raghuram has advised employees across European employers through nilo.health, supporting stress, burnout, anxiety, and workplace conflict, and runs group workshops on stress management and mental health literacy for their client workforces.
Before founding Act for Work, Dr. Raghuram spent years in academic leadership: as Assistant Professor of Management at MacEwan University in Canada, teaching organizational behaviour, leadership, and strategic management, and as Programme Head and Academic Director of a DAAD-funded joint German-Indian Master's program between Christ University and Steinbeis-Hochschule Berlin. The program secured EUR 300,000 in DAAD funding, and under her leadership, doubled enrollment in its first year through a redesigned recruitment strategy that prioritized access for underserved candidates.
Dr. Raghuram looks at three levels: the individual, the team, and the system they sit inside. Most advisory work stops at the individual. She asks what's happening for the person, and also what's happening in the policies, incentives, and cultural norms around them that keep producing the same outcome, whether that's disengagement, low motivation, burnout, or a leader who stalls out at the same career stage.
That comes from working across cultures: leadership and wellbeing workshops in India, DEI and wellbeing consulting for organizations in Canada, corporate mental health advisory in Germany, and academic leadership in India, Germany, and Canada. That range shapes how she reads a leadership or wellbeing problem: accounting for cultural context and the surrounding system, alongside the individual.
Navigating advancement and building the confidence and skills to unlock their potential on their own terms.
First-time managers and senior professionals learning to lead with clarity and consistency.
Organizations building an L&D and wellbeing strategy that addresses the systemic drivers of engagement, motivation, burnout, and performance.
Organizations that treat the two as connected see it show up in retention, engagement, and output. That premise sits behind every project Act for Work takes on.