The people the machine ran on

A third of the bank's workforce quit in a single year. In frontline sales, more than half. The numbers come not from a whistleblower but from the bank's own annual report, its CFO and its HR chief - and behind each percentage point is a human being who carried a target until they couldn't.

There is a number HDFC Bank publishes every year that its advertising never mentions. In FY23 that number was 34.15% - the share of its workforce that left in twelve months, up from 27.60% in FY22 and 15.48% in FY21, as The Hindu BusinessLine reported. One in three employees, gone in a year, from an institution that markets itself as the safest pair of hands in Indian banking. For the curious, the annual report is a confessional. For the serious reader, it is the first crack in the marble.

The pain was not evenly spread. It was concentrated exactly where the pressure lives: at the bottom. Attrition of 40-50% at entry level, CFO Srinivasan Vaidyanathan told reporters after the Q1 FY24 results, per Moneycontrol. And in frontline sales - the people who cold-call, cross-sell and convert deposits into policies - the churn hit 56%, CHRO Vinay Razdan told ETHRWorld. More than half of the sales army replaced annually. A machine does not run numbers like that. It burns through them.

The video

On 5 June 2023, the country got to hear what that pressure sounds like. A screen recording of an internal HDFC Bank video call escaped onto social media and went viral. A zonal head of the bank is heard berating junior colleagues - experienced cluster heads and senior branch managers, men with eight to fifteen years of service - for missing sales targets. Not coaching. Berating. The tone was obnoxious enough that the bank suspended the official within hours and announced an investigation, saying it had zero tolerance for such behaviour, as Hemindra Hazari's analysis in The Wire recounts.

Hazari, a banking analyst who has watched the sector for decades, noticed what the bank's PR statement did not address. It was not the shouting that told the story; it was the silence around it. None of the other senior bankers on the call showed surprise - which suggests either remarkable composure or a repeat offender performing for a familiar audience. And somebody on that call had chosen to record it. An employee had concluded that the only way to document habitual behaviour was to leak it, because the official channels - HR, grievance lines, the celebrated "open door" - had apparently produced nothing. The video was not the scandal. The video was the evidence that scandal had become routine.

The clip spread far beyond banking Twitter - it was dissected on Reddit, in WhatsApp groups of bankers, in the comment sections of every financial news site. Thousands of current and former bankers recognised the voice immediately. Not the individual; the genre. The daily video call, the public humiliation, the target read out like a charge sheet. The internet did what internal escalation could not: it made the bank respond within hours.

The admission

Weeks later came something rarer than a suspension. In the bank's FY23 annual report - the most lawyer-reviewed document a listed company produces - CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan wrote a paragraph no HDFC chief had written before:

"We are cognizant that the experience of working with HDFC Bank can be better on several counts, especially culture... There may be instances where some people managers might transgress our defined way of working. We have the resolve to nip this in the bud."- Sashidhar Jagdishan, HDFC Bank FY23 annual report, via The Hindu BusinessLine

Read that sentence the way it deserves. "Transgress our defined way of working" is corporate for managers behaving badly toward their own people. "Nip this in the bud" is a promise that the bud exists. A chief executive does not write that into an annual report because of one viral video. He writes it because the video confirmed what the attrition data had already told him: something inside the machine was eating the machine's people. Jagdishan attributed the exodus to a post-COVID recalibration of what young workers want - a gentler explanation. The 56% sales churn is not a generation recalibrating. It is a workforce voting with its feet against the terms on offer.

The bank's CHRO pointed outward too: attrition was a sector-wide problem, and none other than RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das had said the central bank was watching attrition across private banks "closely." Both things are true. They are also beside the point. When the central bank of the country is monitoring your staff turnover as a financial-stability data point, the HR problem has become a regulatory one.

"Talk to any banker privately"

Three years later, one of the most respected chroniclers of Indian banking put the mechanism on record. Tamal Bandyopadhyay - author of two books on HDFC Bank itself - told Rediff in September 2026: "Across Indian banking - I'm not singling out HDFC Bank here - there is enormous, relentless pressure on staff to hit sales targets for deposits, loans, selling third-party products, generating fee income and so on. Talk to any banker privately and you'll hear about it."

Relentless is the operative word. The target does not pause for a market crash, a pandemic, or a family emergency; it resets every morning at zero. Deposits to gather, loans to book, third-party products to push, fees to generate - the four dials of the branch scoreboard. And the consequences of missing do not arrive as a gentle chat about development areas. They arrive as the daily video call, the public ranking, the transfer threat, the PIP. The 2023 video shocked the public precisely because the public had never been on one of those calls. Every banker watching had.

Bandyopadhyay's more interesting observation was about supervision. The pressure, he argued, existed under Aditya Puri too - "but I think he managed it better, kept his eyes and ears more open." The pressure itself is a constant of Indian banking; what varies is whether anyone is watching what people do to survive it. His diagnosis of the current moment deserves to be quoted whole: "When you have cracks in three places at once - the sales pressure on the ground, a board and CEO not fully aligned, and a senior team that isn't pulling together - that's when these things surface."

"These things" were not abstract. He was speaking days after the bank's board had fined its own CEO, CFO and retail-assets head ₹1 lakh each over a ₹45 crore deposit arrangement with a Maharashtra road agency - money routed as advertising and sponsorship to pull in deposits, a structure that, as Bandyopadhyay explained to Rediff, flatters the numbers twice: it disguises the true cost of funds and breaks the RBI's rule that the same deposit must earn the same return for the same tenure. Why would senior bankers do that? "The pressure to hit liability targets in an intensely competitive market." The full anatomy of that episode is in Chapter 14. Its origin is here, in the daily target call.

The same logic explains Dubai. When the bank's overseas branch sold an investment product without establishing that buyers' profiles could support it - a violation even if you call it a technical lapse, as Bandyopadhyay told Rediff - the motive was, again, fee income. Pressure does not stay inside the branch. It travels down the org chart and out across borders, and what falls through it lands on customers. Chapter 13 picks up that thread.

The misery ledger

What does all of this cost? Not in sympathy - in rupees. The most complete accounting comes from ETHRWorld's Employer Files series, which mined the bank's annual and BRSR reports through FY26. The scorecard: 2,14,521 employees in FY25. Employee costs of ₹34,136 crore - 20.3% of revenue, up from roughly ₹12,920 crore in FY20. Revenue per employee ₹78.5 lakh; profit per employee ₹31.4 lakh. And, after the churn years, attrition finally easing: 34.15% in FY23, 26.9% in FY24, 22.6% in FY25.

Read the arc the way a serious observer should. The bank hired ferociously for a decade - from 87,555 employees in FY16 to 2.14 lakh in FY25, adding over 40,000 in the merger year alone - and then, in FY25, grew headcount by fewer than 1,000 people. The hiring machine has been switched off. What replaces it, ETHRWorld's analysis concludes, is a productivity machine: extract more revenue, more profit, more output per employee from the army already inside the gates. For shareholders that paragraph reads as operating leverage. For the relationship manager on the morning call, it reads as the same target divided by fewer colleagues.

There is a diversity ledger too, and it cuts two ways. Women rose from 18.3% of the workforce in FY20 to 26.1% in FY25 - tens of thousands of women hired, a publicly targeted milestone crossed. But at senior management level, women hold roughly one in ten positions. The pipeline fills at the bottom and drains before the top. The machine recruits inclusively and promotes narrowly.

The Puri-era bargain

None of this is to say the bank was once gentle. Aditya Puri ran a famously demanding shop for 26 years - long hours, blunt reviews, an intolerance for sloppiness that colleagues described as fearsome. But veterans of that era describe a different contract: the pressure came with protection. Puri's bank promoted from within, paid at the top of the market for performance, and - the detail that recurs in every account - the chief knew what was happening on the ground because he never stopped asking. Bandyopadhyay's formulation to Rediff was that Puri "managed it better, kept his eyes and ears more open." Pressure with supervision is a hard culture. Pressure without supervision is an abusive one, and the line between the two is not drawn by the target sheet. It is drawn by whether anyone senior is watching what the pressure makes people do.

The FY21 attrition figure in the bank's own series makes the point quietly: 15.48%. Same bank, same targets, same industry. What changed by FY23 was not the existence of pressure but everything around it - a once-in-a-century pandemic, a founder-CEO's exit, a merger of unprecedented size, and a new leadership whose own chairman would eventually resign over "values and ethics" (Chapter 12). Culture is not what a company says in its employer brand. It is what the attrition table says three years later.

The complaint economy

Outside the annual report, the same story runs as a parallel, unedited feed. Employee-review platforms carry thousands of HDFC Bank entries whose themes repeat like a chorus: targets described as unreachable, Sunday calls, public shaming on group chats, resignations tendered without another job in hand. After the 2023 video, Reddit threads filled with current and former bankers confirming that the recording was unremarkable - one discussion of the clip asked, in effect, who among them had not been on such a call. Public posts by ex-employees describing daily harassment over sales targets have circulated on LinkedIn for years. These are self-selected, unverifiable individual accounts, and this dossier treats them as such - testimony, not adjudication. But when anonymous testimony, a viral recording, the CFO's own numbers and the CEO's own annual-report paragraph all describe the same phenomenon from four directions, the curious reader stops needing a fifth.

What "down to 22.6%" still means

The bank's improvement is real, and it should be read at full scale. Attrition of 22.6% on a base of 2,14,521 employees means roughly 48,000 people left in FY25 - the better year. At the FY23 peak, the number leaving annually was well above 60,000, more people than many banks employ in total. The bank hired over 85,000 people in a single year just to stand still, as The Hindu BusinessLine noted. That is the treadmill: recruiting on an industrial scale to feed a frontline that exits on an industrial scale, with the customer never seeing the seams - only the churn's consequences: a new relationship manager every few months, a branch where nobody remembers your file, a salesman with nine weeks' tenure structuring your retirement.

The countermeasures the bank lists - manager sensitisation, a nurture-care-collaborate code, listening architecture, retention conversations - are the standard toolkit, and the attrition trend says they are doing something. But note what is not in the list: any change to the target architecture itself. The dials that Bandyopadhyay described - deposits, loans, third-party products, fee income - still reset every morning. The culture programme manages the symptoms of the number. The number remains.

Why the depositor should care

This is a dossier about a bank, not an HR audit. So why devote a chapter to its turnover? Because the pressure described here is not contained inside the organisation. It leaks outward, into products and paperwork, and it lands on customers. The GPS devices quietly bundled into car loans (Chapter 5) were not sold by evil individuals; they were sold by people whose month depended on moving units. The insurance policies with the industry's fattest commissions (Chapter 4) do not walk into customers' portfolios by themselves; a target puts them there. The ₹45 crore deposit arrangement that earned the CEO, CFO and retail-assets head their ₹1 lakh fines was, on Bandyopadhyay's reading, a liability target pursued past the edge of the rulebook. Every scandal in this dossier has the same first mover: a number, handed down, with a name attached and a deadline.

That is why the attrition number matters more than the profit number for understanding this bank. Profit tells you what the machine earned. Attrition tells you what it costs to run. And 34% says the cost, for a long season, was being paid by the people inside it - until they refused, in the only way available to them, by leaving.

The unanswered question

Here is where a serious reader lands. The bank says culture is being fixed and points to a falling attrition line. The analyst says the pressure is structural and points to the fines, the FIRs and the resignations at the very top of the house. Both are reading the same institution. The way to reconcile them is to separate the symptom from the architecture: you can sensitise every manager in the country and still be running a system in which a zonal head believes - correctly, by the scoreboard's logic - that humiliating fifteen-year veterans on a video call is what leadership looks like. The video was deleted from the timeline. The scoreboard was not.

And one more number, for the reader who thinks this chapter is about other people's jobs. Employee costs of ₹34,136 crore against profit per employee of ₹31.4 lakh means the bank earns back its enormous wage bill with room to spare - the economics of the machine are superbly efficient for the machine. The question the rest of this dossier keeps asking is where the efficiency is harvested from. The next chapter gives one answer: it is harvested, to the tune of nearly ₹7,000 crore a year, from the people the machine's people are paid to persuade.

There is a final, quieter data point. In FY25, per ETHRWorld's Employer Files analysis, the bank clocked more than 1.25 crore learning hours - an enormous training investment. Training is what an institution buys when it accepts that its people will mostly be new. A workforce turning over at these rates cannot accumulate institutional memory at the front line; it can only reinstall the manual, branch by branch, cohort by cohort. The customer experiences this as amateur hour at a professional price. The employee experiences it as a career spent permanently at day ninety. And the machine experiences it as a rounding error, because the model does not need veterans. It needs dials, and dials reset every morning.