Letters: Customary service

Apropos Shyamal Majumdar's column "Labour pain in govt banks" (Human Factor, January 17) human resource management in public sector banks is a curious amalgam of negligence of, and capitulation to, the employee demands. An out-of-the-box job design plays a key role in many bank jobs since they are repetitive and dominated by strict procedures providing little room for variation or discretion. However, one continues to see a person updating pass books on a computer or distributing cash from morning to evening. To overcome the tedium the employees leave their stations every now and then and chat with colleagues or rush to the canteen. The victims are the customers waiting in a long queue. At the other end, the bank employees' unions and officers' associations keep extracting more benefits and pay by using the weapon of frequent strikes. Thus, government banks enjoy the most number of holidays in a year, and the average cost per employee in public sector banks is now higher than that for their private sector counterparts. Yet, all this is not accompanied by higher job engagement or more accountability for results.

Y G Chouksey Pune

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