SKS Microfinance: Small Is Beautiful

Nation-building is noble, but how do you get people to come and stay on-board? SKS Microfinance does that with aplomb. It gives out small loans to the marginal — ranging from Rs 2,000 to Rs 12,000 to micro-enterprises that range from raising cows and goats for selling milk to opening a village tea stall. What’s more, it’s got a dedicated lot to do this which is not easy at a time when the financial services world is seen as an El Dorado by the young and restless.

The overall employee strength of the company was 9,698 at end-March 2015. The human resource distribution shows that field employees in branches were at 8,329 (85.9 per cent); at the head and regional offices it was 1,369 (14.1 per cent). The attrition rate during FY2015 was 19.8 per cent; it’s slightly on the higher side, but who said that nation-building was easy?

SKS banks on the contributions of field employees in embarking on a new growth journey. Continuing the thrust on developing and grooming internal leadership among middle-level managers, a series of programmes were initiated. ‘Lakshya’, a programme for assessment and development of unit managers, is built on sustainable and distant-mode learning, fulfilling the next level capability requirement by encompassing modules on leadership. LEAP (Leadership Exploration through Action and Passion) and SAYL (SKS Academy for Young Leaders) have been two such initiatives.

It focuses strongly on building process capabilities among the field employees. Annually around 4,49,502 human-hours of technical training is provided for field employees in seven major Indian languages. Emphasis is laid on new methods of training which includes ‘Gamification’ to make learning fun and impactful.

raghu@businessworld.in