Below is an excerpt from Bindu Ananth’s latest column on the Forbes India Blog.
On Wednesday, we brought together leaders from our Kshetriya Gramin Financial Services (KGFS) companies to talk about best practices from across our operations in Uttarakhand, Orissa and Tamil Nadu. One story really stood out for me – the green stool innovation.
When we were setting up branches in villages which had never been served by formal institutions before, we were very eager to imprint our values in all aspects of our operations. So, our wealth managers hired from the local villages wear uniforms to signal that they are professionals. All visitor cars need to be parked 100 metres away from the branch entrance so that there is no sense of outsider-insider within the branch premises. We insisted that our landlords build bathrooms adjacent to every branch so that we would be able to hire women wealth managers. One of the early things we also did was to have locally made benches painted bright green as the furniture in the branch. The bench seemed to us, to be the metaphoric leveller in a village context often characterised by caste and class divides. Until, one of our employees realised the awkwardness of the bench design.
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