Mastering Retention: Redesigning Frontline Roles for Equity, Resilience, & Success

By: Sayantani Dutta, CHRO, Bajaj Housing Finance Limited

With over 20 years of experience, Sayantani has led impactful work in Human Resources and Organizational Development across leading organizations such as Kotak Mahindra Bank, Vodafone Idea, GE Capital, and Walmart, specializing in talent acquisition, employee engagement, and retention in Financial Services, Telecom, and Retail.

In an insightful interaction with Women Entrepreneurs Review Magazine, Sayantani shares her insights on the hidden drivers of frontline attrition in financial services and reimagining retention for a gig-oriented, digitized workforce—especially addressing cultural myths impacting frontline women talent.

In today’s volatile financial services landscape, which unseen forces are subtly fueling frontline attrition?

The unseen forces fueling attrition is the way jobs are designed and the way incentives are structured for all players– the shareholders, customers, business, leaders, employees & regulators. Business model, cost structures, risk & reward metrics is heavily skewed towards sales acquisition and financial performance metrics. This industry has also seen high growth over a very long time. This has created substantial stretch & hardship in frontline jobs. Also supply of industry ready talent is very strained. Together it creates a perfect storm of sub-optimally trained frontline who struggle to survive an unrelenting and highly metrics driven environment. Attrition is the defect in the system – it is the canary in the coal mine telling you to build an enabling environment.

How do you reimagine retention strategies when dealing with a hyper-digitized, gig-oriented workforce that values flexibility over structure especially for frontline female employees?

This is gender agnostic. Retention strategies today broadly means giving a swathe of monetary & non-monetary benefits to our employees who are segmented into top / critical talent and others. This will change as more HR decisions are tech & data driven with robust predictive models. Frontline retention, going forward will be hyper personalized proactive interventions which will be primarily around the 3 Rs of respect, recognition & rewards. Respect addresses their affiliation needs, recognition and rewards their esteem needs.

What cultural myths around toughness or resilience need to be dismantled to retain and engage frontline women talent in financial institutions?

To excel in any field toughness and resilience is needed. Hence irrespective of gender these are building blocks of success. Let’s understand, that mindsets are built via first-hand experience or basis anecdotal stories. While there some stereotyping or painting with a broad brush not all of it is a myth. What needs to be dismantled is for leaders to believe that work can only happen in conventional ways or draw conclusions from outdated ideal employee profiles, e.g the one who stays late is working hard or the person who is loud and aggressive is more passionate. Another myth that needs to be broken is in women’s mind – they don’t need to mimic to blend in. Quiet strength and performance speak more than anything else.

How can CHROs intentionally design frontline roles to reflect elements often critical for sustaining women in high-pressure environments?

Frontline roles need enablement. Processes need to be easy and clearly understood. These roles should have very limited KRAs with clear agency to the outcome they are accountable for. Highly polarized incentive plans lead to undesirable behaviours and hence that must be very thoughtfully designed. Finally, frontline need to be fairly rewarded for what they are equipped and trained to deliver.

What would a radical, women-led redesign of frontline career pathways look like one that treats frontline attrition not as a problem to fix, but a culture gap to close?

I would think that women would not design career pathways any better than men, only some focus areas may shift. They may give more importance to flexibility of choices – especially incentivize nonlinear moves and lateral moves. They are likely to better plan career transitions and help nurture talent through thoughtful tools. Women are also likely to have career progression criterion that gives significant weightage to emotional quotient.