Few days back, a video quickly went viral on social media where we saw the cluster head of HDFC Bank Kolkata Branch Mr. Pushpal Roy abusing his staff on a video call due to their poor performance. People familiar with banking and financial service industry will tell you that these kind of behavior is very common in their domain, which makes my conviction even stronger that economist and finance Gurus have done more harm to the world than helping it. The lust for money has no end, the more you achieve, you reset your goal to get more & you get caught up in a viscous cycle of greed giving rise to stress and toxic culture.
Joseph Stalin was correct about numbers, he said & I quote,
The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Numbers can create abstraction and can rob you off your humanity, it goes true for politics, business and society as a whole. Soon after the video went viral, the private bank suspended Mr. Roy and initiated an investigation. If you are interested to watch part of the video then you click below however if you are not familiar with Bengali language then you will not be able to comprehend the abuses and words spoken but just by listening to Mr. Roy's disrespectful tone and watching his body language you can pretty much sum it all up.
In a nutshell Mr. Roy was literally abusing and scolding his staff for not meeting targets of opening up new accounts in their branches. One of my personal concern is that I myself have been using the services of this bank for over 17 years and till date other than minor issues here and there, overall I have been a satisfied customer & so this episode really pained me, disturbed me. So much so that I wrote an open letter to the bank and also a copy to the CEO listing out some concerns asking for some clarity regarding this episode,
Below were the concerns raised and what mattered so much was that the suspension took place after video went viral not before it & that the values of the bank put up on their website contained "people" however they did not take action till the time their image was tarnished. Talking, writing is easy- doing is difficult, doing requires everyday practice and not one time effort.
Thanks to the bank's social media handles, I got a few responses and till now I have asked for more clarity about their future actions. I cannot do much staying outside the system however as a customer I thought of raising my concerns and can only hope that it gets read by the right people. End of the day, Let us lead has embarked on a mission and whenever we get a chance we have to create some resistance and feedback mechanism to boost people centricity in organizations. What is an organization without people & customers, nothing.
People like Mr. Pushpal Roy exists in many organizations, they might not be bad people but people put into bad cultures & environment. You change the environment and you get few people aligned to you thinking, together you can create a great culture where you can even transform an individual's behavior & outlook. I sincerely hope not only HDFC but other banks also learns from this episode and treat their managers in a better way to that they in turn treat their employees well. Humans invented numbers, numbers did not invent humans so humans comes first.