The first watershed experience of his human-resources career for DJ Casto was managing through and beyond the spinoff of his company, Synchrony, from General Electric in 2014. The second is less distinct but just as consequential: managing a post-pandemic workforce whose expectations of their employer have grown sky-high.
Casto was the corporate HR leader for GE Capital Retail Finance when it became Synchrony and separated from the GE conglomerate, and tells StrategicCHRO360 that it was a “special experience. What were our values going to be and how were they going to come to life?”
Ten years later, as CHRO of Synchrony, Casto is asking much the same question as he works with other corporate leaders to shape their approach to one of the very most important issues for a company that employs 20,000 people around the world in the consumer financing business for major brands including Lowe’s, PayPal and Amazon.
These days, however, answering that question has much more to do with the preferences and sensibilities of Synchrony’s labor force than ever before, given how things have changed beginning with Covid and since. Other human-capital leaders might learn from how Casto has approached this.
“In today’s market, employees are being a lot more thoughtful than they ever have been about what is the organization they want to be a part of,” Casto says. “Do they see that the organization’s values show up not just in words on a wall but in actions, particularly when it comes to supporting me as an employee during moments that truly matter.”
A West Virginia native, Casto forged his approach to such issues after notching an undergraduate accounting degree and a master’s in industrial labor relations at West Virginia University. He cut his teeth on a number of HR positions at PepsiCo, culminating in more than a year as senior director of global organization development. Then Casto joined GE not long before the company was pivoting into a separation of what would be called Synchrony from the parent GE—an important step in a process that eventually would lead to the dissolution of one of America’s most important industrial conglomerates this year, after 132 years.
“I made the decision to join GE/Synchrony but knew I would be part of an IPO and separation team for taking a portion of GE Capital to become Synchrony,” recalls Casto, whose first role with the company was as senior vice president of human resources for corporate functions. “I was involved in thinking about what was going to be the employer value proposition with a new brand. What were we about? How would leadership be developed?”
An important aspect of Casto’s next role, as senior vice president of HR for Synchrony’s enterprise operations, was to support thousands of employees in 20-some locations in India and the Philippines as well as the U.S. Casto earned a promotion to EVP and CHRO in late 2018.
So he was well situated to lead Synchrony through the tremendous human-capital implications of the three-year pandemic and how it perhaps permanently altered the needs and expectations of a service workforce that remains scarcely supplied. “Our philosophy here is that we want to do what we can do as a company to help our people be their best both personally and professionally,” Casto says. “That will drive peak performance as a business, too.”
It isn’t easy to know exactly how to do so, however. “We have a diverse workforce with diverse needs,” he says.
Here are some ways Casto has been approaching that challenge at Synchrony:
Evolving benefits. “As we think about attracting more individuals to the jobs we hire most, we want to make sure our benefits support who we’re trying to attract,” Casto says.
To achieve that, he says, “We do a lot of active listening to our employees, and they provide us with tons of examples of where, if we can provide them with more support in navigating life’s big moments, the appreciation they have for us and our culture grows even deeper.”
For example, amid a lot of anxiety among millions of young American workers about repaying loans for college education that has become alarmingly expensive—and as the levels of aid from the federal government have been uncertain—many Synchrony employees and recruits have welcomed the company’s recent move to enable them to launch repayment of student loans through their Synchrony 401(k) account.
“Instead of getting a match into the account,” Casto explains, “if an employee wants to prioritize student-loan payments, those dollars can be redistributed. That’s a cohort of employees we want to lean into.”
Casto, a married father of three children whose wife works full-time as well, also has recognized the importance of childcare benefits to many Synchrony employees. Seventy percent of call-center employees are women. Recently, the company improved that area of benefits by providing up to 60 days of “backup” care for kids that can be employed at a moment’s notice.
Previously, Synchrony gave employees an 800 number to call if they had a sudden need for daycare, which required them to drop off their offspring at a nearby childcare facility. “It sounded good in theory, but for a parent, that can be nerve-wracking,” Casto says.
Instead, the company now allows employees to select someone they trust in such a moment of need, and Synchrony will reimburse the worker up to $100 for that day, up to two months, for the service. “Our listening to employees told us that this is a stressful moment, and they need to keep their child safe, and that means leveraging someone they trust,” Casto says.
Serving the whole person. “These are stressful jobs,” Casto says of the typical Synchrony care-center position that involves oral and digital conversations with financial customers. As with any call-ins by consumers, sometimes these conversations can be with confused, agitated, even cranky and confrontational customers. “Typically there’s a friction point. Our people are highly skilled in de-escalating emotion and getting to the root cause and resolving the issue. But they certainly have to navigate taking on emotion and feelings and stress. So one of our number one priorities is investing in total well-being.”
To that end, for instance, Synchrony worked with an outside provider to develop a system of giving workers a 60-second break if they have a “tough” call, determined in part by how long the call takes to resolve the customer’s issue. More than that, employees are trained in a “guided breathing exercise that helps them re-set their compounded stress before they take their next call,” Casto says.
Beforehand, Synchrony asked employees whether they would prefer such a 60-second re-set or a five-minute break. “More than 90 percent of them,” Casto says, preferred the re-set.”
“There’s a direct correlation from this with stronger customer care.”
Balancing with bots. AI via bots has taken over more and more of the actual remote customer service provided by Synchrony and others, but the company tries to strike the right balance between automated and genuine human interaction—which many, many consumers still prefer. The balance is important for employees as well as customers.
“We look at how to provide the best end-to-end customer service and how to provide multiple options for the customer,” Casto says. “What does the customer want and how do they want it? And how can we become more predictive in what people are calling in for, and for resolving it as quickly as possible?”
Institutionalizing hybrid work. There’s been a flow back toward requiring employees to be physically present at a location in the years since Covid, but Synchrony has been sticking with a model that allows mostly remote work since making it successful during the pandemic.
“When we asked, 85 percent of our employees said they wanted us to formalize the option for them to work from home,” Casto says. “We had to radically re-think things. But our leadership team committed to that. And the ability to work from home is a real competitive advantage for us.”
Specifically, Synchrony conducts a “flexibility and choice” model that is “anchored in trust,” Casto says. “We don’t tell people when and how to come in [to the office], but we do encourage them to come to our physical hubs for more-purposeful meetings, for coaching and collaboration.”
These days, Casto says, job-applicant flow at Synchrony is 30 percent higher than before the pandemic, and turnover is at a three-year low.