The HR Shake-Up

The inside story of how Arundhati Bhattacharya is carrying out the big human resources overhaul at SBI. This can become a template for other public sector banks.

- Anand Adhikari

For decades, the country's largest bank, State Bank of India, or SBI, used to do a major part of business - especially deposits, advances and cross sales - in the second half of the financial year. The reasons included audits and closing of annual accounts in the first part of the year, summer vacations, and new transfers/postings. The first two quarters were called the lost quarters. Not anymore.

In 2016/17, SBI met 25 per cent targets in the first quarter, thanks to a new performance management system that gives monthly reports on targets and performance for 90 per cent of the staff. This ensures that employees are always on their toes. "Nobody wants to miss targets as that has a bearing on annual increments," says Prashant Kumar, Deputy Managing Director and Corporate Development Officer at the bank.

SBI, often equated with an elephant for its slow ways and size, is becoming an entirely different animal as a result of a massive human resources, or HR, overhaul that is seeing all 2,00,000 employees at 1,700 locations pull their weight together to meet the challenges of the future. The transformation, among other things, involves making hiring more stringent, a new appraisal system based on measurable targets, and focus on building leadership and new skills to deal with the challenges of changing technology and competition from new tech-savvy financial services players such as payments banks and Fintech companies.

SBI, valued at close to Rs 2.4 lakh crore, knows that the technology used by Fintech players such as Paytm and aspirations of millennials are transforming banking in more ways than one, including the quality of services expected by customers. Then, there are things such as artificial intelligence and robotics taking over mundane and repetitive jobs, making the task of training employees for more value-added work all the more imperative.