Thanks to the awareness that has been created amongst the women in the country
over the last several years to excel on par with men in all walks of life, the intake of
the lady officers in the banking industry has very substantially increased in
almost all the banks. It is nearly 50% of the total recruitment in some of the banks
and it may increase in due course due to the changing demographic profile of
employable educated youth.
They are also to-day accepting challenging postings, transfers, and specialized
areas in the banks without any hesitation. They are now in a position to accept
higher responsibility in their career and look to head the institutions eventually.
The Officers Organisations have been receiving a number of representations,
memorandum and also resolutions highlighting the problems of the lady officers
through the various conferences as well as the Women’s wing. Based on these
feelers and suggestions, it has been decided to exclusively devote a chapter to
consider their special situation and demand appropriate relief from the Indian
Banks’ Association.
(a) PLACEMENT AND POSTINGS:
One of the major concerns of the lady Officers has been their placements and
postings in the banks. The country is yet to develop in the matter of infrastructure,
the facilities exclusively to the lady members in different places. Hence, a separate
Transfer / placement Policy taking into account the problems of the lady officers
should be designed and forwarded to the member banks by IBA. The IT sector is a
classical example where a lot of sympathy is shown to the women employees in the
matter of posting and placement in order to get the best from them. Yet another
major consideration is their safety and security at different centers.
The lady Officers need to be extended the benefit of flexi-time and flexi-place
concept. They should be given choice of their place at the time of transfer and
placement keeping their difficulties in view. The Banks should be advised to keep
one exclusive lady Officer in charge of Personnel Administration in all the Banks
to attend to their exclusive issues including transfer, placement etc.
The lady Officers whose spouses are working elsewhere should be
accommodated at the same place. Similarly, where the wife and husband are
employed in the same bank, they should also be accommodated at the same
centre. The spouse policy given by the Government should be implemented in
toto.
Flexi timing as well as work from home facility should be introduced for a limited
period of 3 years during the entire service.
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(b) PROVISION OF CRECHE FACILITY:
The Banks should provide Creche facility for the benefit of children of Officers
who are required to attend to office as the children need parental attention. ICICI
and many private companies already have this facility.
(c) LEAVE FACILITIES:
The existing Maternity Leave of 6 months at a time should also be extended in case
of adoption of a child (from present 3 months).
3 months’ additional sick leave be sanctioned after attaining the age of 45 years as
lady officers are prone to diseases at this age.
Child Care leave as applicable to the Central Government employees must be
made available to lady officers i.e. two years CCL with salary. It should be also
extended to male officers if they are single parents.
(d) PATERNITY LEAVE:
The Paternity leave should be extended to 60 days on 2 occasions.
(e) LFC/HTC:
Spouse employed in the same bank to be permitted to avail LFC separately as per
individual eligibility. The lady officers should be permitted to take their
dependent parents and parents in law along with them on LFC/LTC.
(f) DEFINITION OF FAMILY:
The parents, father-in-law & mother-in-law, dependent of an officer, sons and
daughters, brothers and sisters divorced or deserted, daughters or sisters etc to
be treated as members of family for the purpose of LFC/HTC and medical
facilities.
(g) Fertility Treatment
Now a days infertility is a serious problem affecting family life. Additional leave of
6 months at different intervals along with salary and medical reimbursement
should be provided. This will also apply to men who undergo infertility treatment.
(h) Work from Home
The Board of the largest Bank, State Bank of India recently approved the ‘Work
from Home’ policy to enable its employees/officers to work while at home using
mobile devices to address any urgent requirement they may have, which prevents
their travelling to work. Now, the Bank informed that it will be using mobile
computing technologies and shall have continuous control over all the enabled
devices centrally to manage and secure the data and applications on the mobile
devices.
The concept of “Work from Home” is a very welcome move, especially for the lady
officers/employees. The increasing number of women in the Bank stands
testimony to their faith in the Industry and their commitment amidst all the
constraints. A large number of organizations have already come up with their
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action-plan to protect the interest of the women in our country. The trade unions
in the organized sector have also contributed their mite to organize the women
workers and help them in providing leadership to women workers and to espouse
their cause with the Government and other agencies. Besides the IT Sector, the
Banking Industry is one of the major sectors, employing a large number of women
who are occupying several high positions in the organization. Hence, it is
imperative on the part of the Bank as well to protect the interest of the women and
ensure a congenial working environment along with the option to work from home
at their convenience.
SBI is now in the process of identifying jobs that can be done from home. We had
requested that the Concept of work from home be introduced to help our officers
who are on sabbatical leave, sick leave and are unable to attend office for various
reasons, but also capable of working from home or elsewhere. We are very happy
that the Board of the Bank has approved it now. We would like to reiterate below a
few areas where the concept of work from home can be introduced and hope that
the Bank will implement the concept soon.
Complaint management Knowledge helpline.
HR helpline/ complaint resolution.
App related queries and feedback resolution
Customer Relationship Management.
Customer Feedback.
Credit appraisal Cross selling Marketing.
Lead management Wealth management ATM cash out monitoring CSP
monitoring.
Inspection and Audit compliance monitoring.
Salary processing and other HRMS linked activities under SAP ERP Market
research for effective marketing and cross selling, telemarketing.
KYC/ FATCA /PAN Seeding/ Aadhaar Seeding other statutory updates (with a
trickle feed module) for bulk upload subsequently at front end.
Legal support RTI Queries Ifams.
NPA monitoring and recovery drive and follow-up.
Help Desk.
HR: Fitment, Scrutinizing Bills such as TA, LFC, Medical etc.
Reservation rooster, promotion exercise data scrutiny, recruitment data scrutiny.
Monitoring Job Family and Transfer Tools.
Scrutinizing bills of vendors, Pathological lab (Tie up).
Follow up of various Pan India initiatives (Present and future) such as: Migration
to cloud server, 2 mbps leased line and backup connectivity, Branch Ambience
etc.
Vendor Management Services for faster resolution of issues of branch and
monitoring of services of vendors.
Customized MIS Data preparation/presentation for seminars, meetings, Training
etc.
We believe that the above mentioned jobs may be considered during
implementation of the concept of work from home. We also demand for the
implementation of the concept of “Work from Home” immediately
(i) FLEXI TIME SCHEME
The initiative aims at creating an employee friendly environment, promoting a
healthy work life balance and employee engagement through welfare measures, in
tune with the best Human Resources practices. This also helps in providing
flexibility to employees to attend to inevitable exigencies of personal /professional
life and will definitely help in reducing attrition.
The concept is already in practice in many private sector undertaking as well as
private sector banks and foreign banks. The flexi timing is only for a limited
period of 2 years during the entire service.
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