When no one wants a promotion

The appraisal system in public sector banks needs to improve

A couple of days before the interviews for internal promotion of junior officers, a general manager of a public sector bank (PSB) was told some of the candidates were keen to meet him. Sensing that they want to lobby for their promotions, the GM was keen to avoid meeting them, but relented after he was told they have been waiting for a very long time.
 
The meetings were an eye-opener. All of them had the same request: Please do not promote us. The bank had quite a few vacancies at the next level and was keen to fill the vacancies, and all that these guys wanted was they should not be considered suitable for promotion. In other words, they wanted the GM to exercise his influence to make sure that they fail in the interviews.

 
The reasons for this strange request were varied: Some did not want to relocate, while others had family issues. A few others said they were near retirement and did not want additional responsibilities at the fag end of their careers. The basic theme of the discussions was the bank did not care about them when they were willing to take up bigger responsibilities and gave them the same job year after year; so what’s the point in promoting them when they don’t have any career ambition left? A couple of them had an interesting take: A branch manager’s job was the most thankless; they won’t get any support from the seniors and would be made scapegoats if a problem arose.

 

So why did they apply for the promotions in the first place? Almost all of them said they didn’t do so voluntarily, but the bank left them with no option — either appear for the interviews or you would be transferred out of the region in the same position.
 
The GM says the brief meetings with the junior officers sums up everything about what has gone wrong with the human resource planning in PSBs. In most cases, the promotions are an exercise in futility. What on earth will the bank gain by promoting these reluctant junior officers to the next level if they have all been found to be inadequately skilled so far in their career? The second issue was that the bank did not initiate any development intervention to upgrade their skills.

 
The first problem is with the appraisal system. As the A K Khandelwal-led committee on HR in PSBs says, the appraisal system is routinely administered. Much of the appraisals and ratings have upward bias, with 80–90 per cent of the appraisees getting ‘excellent’ rating. This inclination of the immediate supervisors not displeasing anybody does not lend to distinguishing performers from non-performers. Further, it generally has a cascading effect leading to mediocrity at all levels. This system has been going on for years for one simple reason: The immediate supervisors have no power, they can’t incentivise or punish any of their subordinates, so the general feeling is why spoil relationships by being miserly in ratings.

 
Besides, the promotion policy, in force for several years, has built in rigidity in the matter of minimum length of service required to be put in by an officer in a particular scale for becoming eligible for promotion to the next higher scale. For example, the panel report says earlier, it used to take as many as 17 years for an officer in Scale I to become chief manager (Scale IV) and another eight years to become general manager (Scale VII). This resulted in an extremely adverse age profile of both executives and senior officers. This changed somewhat after bank managements were given managerial autonomy by the government to relax the eligibility criteria for promotions from one scale to another and frame their own promotion policies, including fast track promotions.

 
Some banks have taken advantage of this, but the overall result hasn’t improved much in the absence of a structured mechanism such as assessment centres for identifying potential.