SBI takes Harvard lessons for staff appraisal

State Bank of India, the country's largest lender with 213,000 employees, has roped in Harvard Business School for performance appraisal of its middle and senior management. All employees above the deputy general manager and up to deputy managing director's level now necessarily have to take 10-20 e-modules linked to their performance appraisal.

An employee can earn up to five points in the overall performance appraisal, which is of 100 marks, if they clear all the mandated modules. Training via e-modules has been made mandatory for SBI officers.

Apart from the 40 modules that Harvard prepared, SBI internally has developed 500 e-modules for its staff, which all employees, including probationary officers, have to take. "Modules are assigned to the officers according to their work profile. In a year, an employee gets 10 to 20 e-modules to clear," said a senior executive with the bank.

The lender has beefed up its training activity in the past couple of years and closed the training gap, which was as high as 55.45 per cent at the end of March 2013. The gap narrowed to 2.45 per cent by the end of March 2015. SBI Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya had recently said that the bank would use technology extensively to match skills with roles. Talent management and capacity building have been key areas of the bank's human resources repositioning initiative.

Staff training is conducted under the supervision of the strategic training unit, and its training apparatus at present consists of five apex training institutes and 48 learning centres. The government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have been nudging banks to improve the quality of human resources.

The government's public sector bank reform initiative - Indradanush - unveiled by the finance ministry last week, has included skill development and talent management to measure the performance of public sector banks.

These are called key performance indicators or KPI. The finance ministry said human resource management would have five per cent weight in KPI. Consistent effort on training has resulted in increased growth in business and profitability for SBI.

The bank's business per employee has increased from Rs 7.04 crore to Rs 12.34 crore between FY11 and FY15. Profit per employee also increased from Rs 3.85 lakh in FY11 to Rs 6.02 lakh in FY15.