Company: InnovateCorp (fictitious), a fintech startup with 320 employees, building digital lending, payments and wealth management products for retail and small business customers across India.
Background
Six months ago, InnovateCorp introduced a three-day in-office mandate. The rationale was straightforward. Leadership believed collaboration, culture and speed of decision-making had suffered during the years of full remote work, and that bringing people together for at least part of the week would restore what had been lost.
Most employees complied. A few pushed back initially but adjusted. The policy held.
Then Priya Menon’s manager, Vikram Rao, raised a concern with HR.
Priya is a Senior Product Manager who has been with InnovateCorp for three years. The product she owns accounts for nearly 40 per cent of the company’s revenue. By every internal measure, she is one of its most critical employees.
She also lives 80 kilometres from the office. She is a single parent and manages eldercare responsibilities at home. A 160-kilometre round trip, three days a week, is simply not manageable. She has tried. It has not worked.
Priya has told HR she will resign if the policy is enforced as written. She is not threatening the company. She is describing a reality.
HR now has to decide what to do with it.
The dilemma
Should HR enforce the policy uniformly, holding the line on consistency even if it means losing an employee whose product generates 40 per cent of company revenue?
Or should it grant Priya an exception, protecting the business but signalling that policies become negotiable when an employee is valuable enough?
And if neither feels right, is there a third path: use Priya’s case to redesign the policy itself, replacing a blanket mandate with clear criteria around role requirements, personal circumstances and distance that apply to everyone?
What’s really at stake?
This is a test of whether workplace policies are universal principles or simply starting points for negotiation.
Priya is not asking for flexibility because she is a high performer. She is describing circumstances the policy was never designed to accommodate: single parenthood, eldercare and an 80-kilometre commute. Those circumstances exist independently of the revenue she controls. The question is whether the organisation can separate the two.
If HR enforces the policy and Priya leaves, InnovateCorp does not just lose an employee. It loses institutional knowledge, client relationships and product expertise tied to 40 per cent of its revenue. In a startup, that is no longer merely a talent problem. It becomes a business continuity problem.
But granting Priya an exception without a framework creates another problem. Every employee who has rearranged their life to comply with the mandate will notice. The message is difficult to miss: policies apply to everyone, except perhaps those the company cannot afford to lose.
There is a third risk. If InnovateCorp does nothing about the policy itself, this will not be the last such case. The person and circumstances may change, but HR will find itself confronting the same question again.
The deeper question is harder to avoid: if a policy produces an outcome that makes neither business nor human sense, is the problem the person asking for an exception or the policy that created the need for one?
We asked three HR leaders how they would approach this dilemma.
What HR leaders said
Gaurav Singh, CHRO, Centricity WealthTech
“Policies should serve business outcomes and employee wellbeing, not exist for their own sake. Priya’s case reveals that a flat three-day mandate may be the wrong tool for a distributed fintech team.
HR should not create an exception simply because Priya is a high revenue contributor.
If policies become negotiable based on business impact alone, it risks creating a perception that there are two sets of rules: one for high performers and another for everyone else. That can gradually erode trust, engagement and the culture of fairness.
However, this case also deserves a practical lens. Priya’s request is driven by genuine personal circumstances: a long commute, single parenting and eldercare responsibilities, not convenience. If she is solely responsible for a business-critical product and her role can be effectively delivered remotely without impacting collaboration, a structured hybrid exception may be justified. Such an arrangement should be documented, approved through a formal governance process and reviewed periodically based on business outcomes.
The exception criteria should be clearly defined: critical revenue contribution combined with significant caregiving responsibilities and distance constraints. These criteria should be communicated transparently so that others in similar circumstances can apply under the same framework. This situation is not just about one employee. It is about balancing business continuity, employee empathy and organisational credibility.”
Babita Basak, HR Leader
“This is a classic clash between distributive fairness, treating everyone identically, and procedural equity, accounting for asymmetrical circumstances.
InnovateCorp faces a choice between two distinct types of institutional pain: losing 40 per cent of its revenue to protect a policy or risking internal cultural friction to protect a critical asset.
The strategic decision must be to grant the exception but execute it as a calculated, time-bound risk mitigation strategy rather than a permanent concession.
Enforcing the policy uniformly preserves absolute cultural consistency and eliminates any perception of favouritism. But in a fintech startup, losing a core product manager who owns nearly half the revenue creates an existential key-person risk that principles alone cannot resolve.
Granting the exception safeguards immediate revenue and retains critical product knowledge. The risk is that it breeds resentment among employees who make personal sacrifices to comply and signals that workplace policies are negotiable if an individual amasses enough leverage.
To grant the exception without breaking the culture, HR must shift the narrative from favouritism to operational pragmatism. The accommodation must be tied to a strict, non-negotiable condition: Priya must spend the next three to six months documenting her product architecture, workflows and decision-making processes. A junior product manager should be assigned to shadow her, with the objective of decentralising her product knowledge and eliminating the single point of failure her role currently represents.
The arrangement must be framed around documented, extreme logistical constraints, an 80-kilometre commute combined with eldercare responsibilities, alongside independent role compatibility, not purely performance or revenue metrics.
Priya’s situation did not create this crisis. It exposed a structural flaw in InnovateCorp’s approach. A rigid blanket mandate is a blunt instrument that fails to account for business continuity or modern talent realities. The company must transition from a centralised mandate to a team-led hybrid model where decisions about co-location are made at the functional level, balancing collaboration requirements with individual role outputs.”
Gurjeet Singh, Global Talent Acquisition Head, Atain
“When evaluating workplace policy, the primary objective must be maximising aggregate outcomes: long-term organisational health, overall performance and systemic productivity. Enforcing rules purely for the sake of uniformity reflects poor management.”
In Priya’s case, pushing her to resign creates an immediate crisis. Losing a key resource responsible for 40 per cent of revenue puts business stability and growth directly at risk. Beyond that, forcing someone to commute 160 kilometres round trip generates unnecessary friction, burnout and reduced efficiency. At the same time, making ad hoc exceptions creates systemic risks if perceived as bias or favouritism.
The solution is not to break the rules behind closed doors but to adapt the policy framework. Losing 40 per cent of revenue to protect an attendance rule makes no business sense. The answer is to shift from exceptions to criteria: establish clear, objective guidelines for remote or hybrid arrangements so that any employee who meets the defined threshold can apply for similar flexibility. By building a transparent flexibility model rather than granting an ad hoc pass, InnovateCorp keeps its highest-performing talent, protects its core revenue and builds a culture grounded in logical decision-making rather than leverage.”
If you were the CHRO at InnovateCorp
Priya will resign if the policy is enforced. The rest of the organisation is watching.
What would you do?
• Enforce the mandate and accept the risk of losing her in the interest of consistency?
• Grant a structured exception based on clear criteria around distance, caregiving and role compatibility?
• Redesign the policy itself, replacing the blanket mandate with a role-based hybrid framework?
Or is the bigger question this:
If a policy cannot survive contact with the people it was designed for, was it ever really a policy, or just a preference with consequences?
Share your perspective in the comments or on LinkedIn using #HRKathaCaseInPoint.