Why leaders are resetting the pay, flexibility and loyalty blueprint for Gen Z

Omnicom Global Solutions India (OGS); Sudipta Marjit, Group CHRO, Tata AutoComp Systems; Shantanu Rooj, Founder and CEO, TeamLease Edtech; and Vijay Yalamanchili, Founder and CEO, Keka, to understand this contradiction that is forcing them to relearn employee loyalties, career growth aspirations and employee expectations from a Gen Z lens.

Reframing the loyalty issue

The shift began with a definition change. “I believe we need to stop looking at this as a loyalty issue and start looking at it as an expectations issue,” Patney said.

At OGS, that meant withdrawing tenure as the scoreboard and replacing it with something closer to momentum — whether employees were “building meaningful capabilities, gaining exposure to new experiences, and seeing visible pathways for growth.”

The company’s ‘One OGS’ structure, which folded media, data, technology, AI, creative, commerce and business operations into a single ecosystem, existed largely to give that momentum somewhere to go.

At Tata AutoComp, where Gen Z makes up 45.75 percent of the workforce, the same instinct produced a different architecture.

Marjit built a talent pathway that moved trainees directly into Assistant Manager roles, layered with certifications from INSEAD, London Business School, University of Warwick and IIM Nagpur.

That path paid off in numbers seen alongside a churn statistic wherein attrition fell from 28 percent to 19 percent, internal job fills rose from 18 percent to 42 percent, and engagement scores climbed from 68 to 81.

Rooj went further and called it a mislabelled problem entirely. Retention, he argued, was shifting from “time spent in the organisation” to “value created, skills gained and career progression enabled” inside the first 6 to 12 months, which is less an HR metric and more an employability one.

For Yalamanchili, the estimation was personal. The 38 percent figure did not surprise him, he said, because he could trace the exact moment his own answer to retention stopped working.

What kept people at Keka in its 50-person days was visible ownership and work that mattered, and that had to be entirely rebuilt. “The question we should be asking is not ‘how do we retain Gen Z’ but ‘what are we actually offering them in the time they are here?'”

His new standard set was, if someone visibly grew every quarter, if they had had an honest conversation with their manager about direction, if they felt their work connected to something larger.

“If those three things are true, we are doing our job. If they are not, the person leaving at 11 months is not the problem. We are,” he said.

Redefining retention

If retention no longer meant years, measuring it could no longer mean waiting for an annual cycle either. Every leader had, in effect, rebuilt their dashboards around the first few months of employment rather than the last few years.

Marjit tracked learning participation, certification completion, internal mobility and leadership readiness as early signals of retention.

Tata Autocomp’s internal mobility was up 20-25 percent, upskilling completion had crossed 70 percent, and productivity across critical teams had improved 18 to 20 percent.

Patney viewed speed-to-productivity and cross-functional exposure at OGS as a leading indicator of engagement, run alongside, and not replacing, the traditional numbers.

Rooj pointed to ramp-up time and first-project performance within 6 to 9 months, citing TeamLease’s own Career Outlook Report, which found employers increasingly hiring on proof of skill rather than credentials.

At Keka every new hire got a buddy from day one and four structured check-ins in their first 30 days.

“The question we ask is not ‘Are they still here?’ but ‘Are they becoming successful here?'” Yalamanchili said, adding that the company now tracked time to first meaningful contribution and the quality of career conversations between employees and managers. In theory, as he put it, “the strongest predictors of long-term success are often visible much earlier than organisations think.”

Pay matters, but it may not be enough

Compensation remained the loudest variable, but none of the four treated it as the whole answer.

Rooj described the reward model tilting toward “competitive fixed pay for stability, variable pay linked to outcomes, flexibility for autonomy and learning investments for future growth”, a shift he traced to a change in the question asked by early-career employees.

It was no longer “what will I earn today?” but “what will I become in the next 12 months?”

Yalamanchili’s strategy at Keka ran on the same premise- fixed pay as the non-negotiable foundation, “pay for performance” incentives tied directly to outcomes, and recognition that did not wait for a review cycle to arrive.

Flexibility, as he said, was never about geography and physical presence. Keka called itself “flexi-first,” not remote-first. “The objective is not attendance. The objective is outcomes. If someone delivers, I am not going to question where or when they worked.”

What was actually moving the needle

Having stripped away the frameworks, and the clearest signal came from what employees were doing unprompted.

At OGS, Patney pointed to the past 12 to 18 months, in which GenAI adoption had spread well beyond the technology function- where people in operations, analytics and people functions were all building microsites, automating workflows and shipping AI-powered assistants without being asked to.

That kind of self-initiated building, she said, had become one of the strongest engagement signals the company had.

Rooj shared data pointing similarly, from a different angle where early-tenure retention improved most where employees had role clarity, manager support and visible skill progression– a pattern he said recent workplace research was now confirming across India’s L&D priorities.

At Keka, the biggest switch turned out to be the oldest ritual in the employee lifecycle – onboarding.

Yalamanchili rebuilt it to hand new hires “a real problem, with real ownership, within the first few weeks,” rather than a compliance checklist.

Behind that decision sat a harder observation about why people actually left, “By the time a manager sits down to talk about growth, the person has already quietly decided to leave. We try to have that conversation before it becomes urgent.”

Building for ‘one year’ that might be the only one leaders get

Knowing an employee might stay 12 months changed what companies chose to build for them.

At OGS, that meant investing in capability over titles- platforms such as OGS Pro and academy hubs in Coimbatore and Mohali, and GenAI learning pathways, backed by mentoring and buddy networks meant to manufacture belonging faster than tenure normally would.

Tata AutoComp took a more structural route- an AI-enabled Learning Experience Platform for personalised learning journeys, a Future Skills Academy for digital and analytics skills, Individual Development Plans tied to performance goals, a dedicated college-hiring track with a defined line to Deputy Manager and Assistant Manager, and an Internal Gig Marketplace for employees to test other functions without switching companies to do it.

Rooj named structured onboarding, project-based exposure, mentor access and short learning sprints as the models delivering the fastest returns.

Job rotations, apprenticeships and live projects, he said, gave Gen Z a reason to stay precisely because they gave employers a reason to keep them.

Yalamanchili called his version “conviction-led mobility.” When an employee showed genuine energy for a different function six months into the job, Keka built the pathway rather than asking them to wait for a review cycle to make it official.

“The best thing you can do for a Gen Z employee in their first year is give them something real to own, tell them honestly how they are doing, and show them a credible path forward. When those three things are present, the question of whether someone stays or leaves largely takes care of itself,” he said.

Thus, what emerged across all four conversations was not a set of perks but a change in the unit of measurement.

Employers who once tracked years now tracked months; those who once waited for annual reviews, now built check-ins at 30 and 60 days. None of these will reverse the 38 percent figure overnight.

Yet each of these leaders took the same chance – that it is the speed of value exchanged in a year, not the length of the stay, that will decide whether Gen Z talent stays anyway.