This article was a part of my submission to the SRF’s (Social Responsibility Forum) Article Writing Competition at SBM, NMIMS Mumbai. I bagged the 1st Runners-Up position 😀
With mental health being the new buzz word around, I am elated to share my experience with fellow B-School students here, from a different company background: a type of industry that usually doesn’t (read can’t) afford to provide placements at the top 20 Indian B-schools.
I am not sure about how many other B-Schools follow this procedure, but at SBM, NMIMS, we have a “We Care” internship from the 4th week of January to the 3rd week of February. The We Care: Civic Engagement Internship has been initiated to acquaint students to examine social realities, understand BOP markets, and engage them in civic activities. Students undertake projects which are aligned with various SDGs like healthcare and education. It was during my internship stint with a microfinance organisation that I realised how important is employee wellbeing is not only to the employee, but to the organisations as well.
Formal financial institutions show a preference for urban over rural sectors, large-scale over small scale transactions, and non-agricultural over agricultural loans. Hence, Microfinance in India started in the late 1980s in response to the gap in availability of formal sources of credit and lending to the underserved and low income population.
Microfinance companies in India conduct the following operational procedure: awareness creation, group formation (Small Help Groups), document verification (checking legal documents like Aadhar and Voter ID), loan sanction, loan disbursal & finally loan amount collection. This process is very tiring and cumbersome as it involves long travel hours (a normal day on field is working for 10 hours), talking to rural people, and then coming back to process the papers.
I encountered the following issues being faced by the junior credit officers:
- Cumbersome paper work, with outdated software to work on
- Long and erratic working hours (12+ hours a day)
- Undefined work profile
- Going out for loan collection for long hours without any food, water or sanitation facilities. (nearly 50% of the workforce is female)
- There is also a fear of the money being stolen (as collection is purely in cash)
I used to follow a credit officer every day to his/her territory to understand how this business works. Apart from the business, I also got to learn about their expectations from the company that were not fulfilled:
- Lack of advanced software training for the junior employees
- Lack of safety procedures for women employees (employers and clients badmouth sometimes)
- High attrition rate
- Low salary
While the targets are usually met, the emotional and physical wellbeing of the employees is most often ignored. From what I have understood after studying one single company for 4 weeks, I have realised that there is no such concept of employee wellbeing in the industry, or is rare. The employees are always pressurised with unrealistic targets and are often forced to stay back in the job because they have nowhere to go. They have neither motivation, nor inspiration. They are tired, hungry, tensed and frustrated all the time.
There was a bright side to all this as well: following the high attrition rate, the company actually realised the blunder it was making. The HR now compulsorily tries to include the juniors in a training session once in every 2 months. The Regional Head pays a quarterly visit to the branch offices, and they have a healthy discussion around the issues that are bugging the employees. The colleagues go on picnic sometimes and cook their own lunch.
While nothing has been done till now to understand the mental health aspects of the employees in this industry, the rapid growth of the PM’s Jan Dhan Yojana has certainly kicked off a frenzied activity around small saving banks. This, I believe would provide stiff competition to the current microfinance industry and they would be forced to upgrade some of their practices. An effortless operational procedure would certainly take away more stress than a fat pay check could ever do!
THE FUNKY WRITER 