KATHMANDU, JUNE 07

The corornavirus pandemic has upended life in general, but at the same time underscored the importance of frontline workers providing essential services. These include most bank jobs, which are customer-facing. At a time when the country is battling the second wave of the pandemic,

Sujit Shrestha, the chief operating officer of Standard Chartered Bank Nepal, shared with The Himalayan Times the numerous challenges faced during the first lockdown, overcoming them, and the prospects as the bank gears up to adapt to the post-pandemic 'new normal'. Excerpts:

Were there any challenges during the start of the pandemic that were unique to Nepal?

As any organisation with responsibility towards its clients and staff, we do have contingency plans for crises which are simulated regularly. Even during 2015 earthquake, SCBN was able to provide services to its clients from day one using alternate sites and arrangements. However, this COVID-19 pandemic is a unique crisis that too for such a prolonged period and hence, no organisation would have thought of and be prepared for it. So first and foremost, it was a big challenge to comprehend the scale and duration of the pandemic. However, having an international network, we started getting feedback from our offices in different markets that experienced pandemic crisis early, we started getting the feed somewhat in advance. But of course, as soon as we went into full lockdown, it was a complete different situation than anyone of us anticipated. Our people had to stay wherever they were and operate remotely from the very first day. The biggest challenge for first few days was to communicate and coordinate large number of dispersed staff. Despite good number of staff connected to the bank's systems remotely using their laptops, there were still substantial number of staff who required remote working capabilities.

As people never had option to work from home for longer period in the past, most of our staff didn't have proper workstation setup for remote working. Arranging these logistics and technology infrastructure was a herculean task for our central support teams. We were required to run our regular meetings for many teams virtually at scale. The requirement was much more that few audio or video conference rooms. Some of our technology systems and capabilities were not ready to support remote access which required teams to visit office for processing transactions and supporting client requirement.

The first line on the meta-tag of the Standard Chartered Bank Nepal's website reads 'The best way to inspire is often by example'. Can you provide examples of initiatives taken by the bank during the pandemic that were an industry first?

We were amongst very few organisations which were able to switch majority of processing and servicing services to remote working model very quickly. Our regulator, central bank, appreciated the Work from Home (WfH) approach the bank had taken to ensure no disruption to client services while protecting health of our staff. The approach was further socialised to the industry and many banks adopted it progressively. Amongst many services that we provided to our clients, our 24X7 Client Care Centre, Trade and Payment Operations ensured that critical transactions and services were never halted. We ensured these departments were fully capable of working remotely. Our technology team delivered many solutions on enterprise technology capabilities, voice/video conferencing and other collaboration tools at much faster speed.

Over the few weeks into complete lockdown, the bank completely shaped up its new virtual working environment that was capable of sustaining the pandemic crisis for much longer time. We used all available communication tools to keep our teams informed and connected. Our communication teams and people leaders helped everyone to stay on course by over-communicating and keeping the engagement level high. Faster adoption of new ways of working by staff is something that we did really well.

StanChart has said it will make permanent the flexible working arrangements introduced during the pandemic, and that it could cut a third of its office space in the next three to four years. Will the Nepal office also follow this strategy and if so, will it result in redundancies?

We've launched Future Work Now programme in various offices across geographies. It is being launched in phases and over 80 per cent of staff in various countries will be eligible to opt for flexible working arrangements over the next few years. Needless to mention, the pandemic has pushed many organisations to revisit the working arrangements in consideration of getting the most suitable model that will be sustainable both from productivity of organisation and wellbeing of staff. As we all know, the world ahead is not going to be same as it was in past, there will be significant effort required from organisations to make themselves ready for the 'new normal'. We believe, in future, people will have more preferences over the work arrangements - balancing between onsite and remote working. We are exploring all possible arrangements considering unique requirement of different job functions and roles and there will be some proportion of flexible working arrangement available for specific roles in future on permanent basis.

Key objective of flexible working is to bring better productivity in work while making it independent of location. We are not focusing on redundancies as outcome of this initiative, but we will be looking into opportunities to optimise or maximise use of our premises to support our future growth with the help of hybrid work model which provides flexibility for staff to work from different locations.

There has been a growing discourse on the 'right to disconnect'. Can you elaborate on the measures put in place to ensure the work-life balance of the SCBN staff?

Work-life balance for staff has never been more important than at current times due to variety of omnipresent digitally enabled official communications. We have Flexible Working Practice guidelines to support work-life balance of staff. Staff can opt for flexible working pattern without compromising and impacting the service to our clients with due approval from their people leader. We strongly encourage our staff to 'switch off' outside of work hours as they would under normal circumstances. NAlong with physical wellness of our staff, we have also laid much emphasis on their mental wellbeing. We offer apps for mental wellbeing of our staff where they can access a wide variety of customised programmes. We have conducted a number of awareness sessions for staff on a variety of possible softer/ mental and behavioural concerns due to the existing situation. We have empanelled psychologists and mental wellbeing specialists where staff can choose to speak to them directly. There are regular and consistent communications imparted to staff on the need to remain physically and mentally fit.

Line managers are strongly encouraged to regularly catch up with their teams not just to talk about work but also help with any personal issues. It has been clearly stated that our staff are our responsibility and should there be any health emergency, the organisation is ready to extend all possible assistance - be it financial, logistics or otherwise.

I feel proud to belong to an organisation that is truly 'human'. The way the organisation cares for its employees is exemplary. Even in these tough unprecedented situations, we have made sure all possible help, guidance, assistance is provided to our staff. As banking is essential services with the needs for certain staff to be in office, we have provided all facilities not limited to conveyance, healthy lunch and personal protection equipment. All our staff are adequately insured. We have a 'Pandemic Committee' that is hands-on and accessible at all times.

A version of this article appears in the print on June 8, 2021, of The Himalayan Times.