Strugggling to make sense out of things!
By: AAMIR AYOUB MIR
Every person in this world has regret in life regarding some decision that he made at some point of his life. Some mistakes you make knowing that something is wrong about it, but most of our bad decisions arise due to our misconceptions. One of the recent regrets of my life after experiencing 2 months of a failed and stressful work life was after being appointed as “Relationship Executive” in the JKB FINANCIAL SERVICES, that later on proved to be a misnomer which deceived a lot of aspirants to think that they have been selected as RE’s while in reality we were selected as Sales Executives which puts us in a lot of stress and ambiguity. The days I was at the JKB Branch proved to be humiliating at times and thus made us lose our self respect.
When I first joined, my perception of joining Jammu & Kashmir Bank Financial Services Ltd was like I had achieved something substantial and, believe me, I thought that I got my dream job , since I am a Finance student, I was quite happy.
But my enthusiasm was shattered when it was revealed to us that we are in a sales job that requires achieving targets. Come on- we cleared IBPS examination and also the interview process. Show some sort of respect to the talented lot of over 100 candidates who were selected out of 6000 aspirants. The 5th or 6th day of training was quite shocking when I came to know that we have to sell financial products to people even if they don’t want to. Every day it was getting more and more humiliating.
You are putting new college and university pass outs that are inexperienced in the firing line and expect them not to crumble under pressure, shows immaturity of your business strategy and this is coming from a person who is well versed with strategic management.
Employee welfare is nowhere to be seen. We had a training schedule of 30 days and believe me it takes me 200 rupees as transport charges from Pulwama to Srinagar, and there was no provision for any travelling allowances.
You accepted us as your employees but where the welfare and policy of internal communication is? The ambiguity made me think hard about the future prospects of my career, and I am not willing to sacrifice my future for a mere sum of money and a job where you are humiliated every day. It has been the worst experience for me and ALLHAMMDULILLAH, I will say that I made the right call and thus saved myself from being dragged into a hell hole.
In the offer letter it is mentioned that one month’s pay and all training charges will be deducted, but there is no mention of notice period penalty, but I have been forced to pay all of these.
You need to have an efficient internal communication in order to close the door for any type of ambiguity. Otherwise the employees feel alienated due to the fact that we were not treated as employees and we had no authority over certain key things that are more than important to functioning of our services.
When you go for diversification or for expansion, you analyse your strengths and weaknesses, but practicality shows that JKBFSL proved to be too weak and primitive in its operational setup. One of demat accounts that I accepted on May 15th is still to be process as I am writing this piece and believe me that person is a JK Bank employee! There are ‘n’ number of such cases where more than a months has taken place for merely opening a demat account. This shows that the management is quite primitive which makes the frontline people n the firing line as customers want quick service. There is enormous clutter and chaos in activating a mere demat account which makes people feel we the newcomers are worthless, but little do they know that the management is still thinking that let the new comers face this humiliation and with time the organisation will be comfortable with that. This part makes the JKBFSL a sort of failure due to mismanagement and making qualified people do sales jobs and asking them to go out and bring accounts for JKBFSL.
A satisfied employee is a big asset to any corporation. But instead treating the same workforce as cattle isn’t feasible. Strictness is very important in an organisation, but trying to make your own employees discouraged and de-motivated is quite sad.
Some of the good things I felt after joining JKBFSL is that, Alhamdulillah, the experience with the HR team of JKBFSL was quite awesome and I want to specifically thank JKBFSL PULWAMA BRANCH HEAD Mr. Shahid Drabu ,who helped me a lot to overcome the humiliation and also helped me how to fill a Demat Form accurately and always motivated me about the whole work process which made me feel relaxed. How to fill a form correctly was not shown to us during 30 day training course for which I had to expend Rs. 200 daily as travel expenses that was never talked off even when I mailed the authorities about the same!
And as I have already discussed, Financial services are going to play a huge role in boosting the economy of our state and also help in growth of money of people. So this field is untapped and thus this initiative from JKBFSL is very good, but the way they implemented this business plan is plan the worst any one may call it.
The writer is MBA in Finance & Marketing, has done NET IN Management and is pursuing PHd in Financial Management from KU.
