By putting in place a strong team and processes, bringing in clarity of vision and purpose, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance clocked a 58 percent jump in business amid the pandemic
Santanu Banerjee, CHRO (left), Tarun Chugh, managing director & CEO
Image: Nayan Shah for Forbes India
Insurance is a brick-and-mortar product,” says Santanu Banerjee, CHRO of Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance Company (BALIC). “The product itself is intangible, but the person selling it is not. It has a very touch and feel quality to it.”
Yet, BALIC has not just managed its business through the Covid-related lockdowns but actually saw it jump by 58 percent, at a time when the industry as a whole shrunk. How so?
“I would say the culture we’ve built and the quality of our team [now 15,000-strong, up from 5,000 five years ago] helped us sail through,” says Tarun Chugh, BALIC’s CEO. The culture, he says, is rooted in values of empathy, customer satisfaction, collaboration, high-tech innovation and ownership. But this wasn’t the case five years ago when the legacy organisation was ridden by archaic processes, siloed departments and bureaucratic behaviour.
By first putting in place a strong team and processes, bringing in clarity of vision and purpose, BALIC’s top leadership was able to create an agile, responsive and high-performance workforce. By the time Covid-19 struck in March 2020, the foundation had been set, explains Chugh.
(This story appears in the 11 March, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)