Encomium
– As Keystone and Enterprise Banks retrench
It is going to be a black Christmas and New Year for some sacked workers of two Nigerian banks. Enterprise Bank and Keystone Bank carried out their rationalisation recently and 200 plus were affected.
Keystone Bank started the festive season by pruning their workforce. They asked some of their top managers to go home. 52 senior staffers were asked to go, and according to the management, “It is the bank’s rationalization exercise for effective services.”
The affected staffers, however, are not taking the development in their stride as they staged a protest and threatened court action over what was termed retrenchment without adequate compensation. Most of these aggrieved sacked staffers were between deputy general managers and managers.
A source who painted the scenario in which some of them were asked to go said some were notified of the termination of their appointment a day before, while others were flushed out while still working. This has cast dark clouds on the sacked staffers yuletide celebration as most of them are now thinking of where and how to start with their lives.
After the Keystone Bank drama, Enterprise Bank, headed by Mallam Ahmed Kuru, on Monday, December 2, 2013, rolled out names of 150 of their staffers for retrenchment, a development the management tagged as rationalisation.
Those affected in this sacking spree are basically, Lagos Island branches. It was said to have cut across some units of the bank, and as it is, majority of those left are apprehensive as they don’t know who is next. Source revealed more may still go as the management compiles more names.
The management, in its defence, said the laying off of some of its workforce was in line with the company’s plan to remain competitive in the market. A statement from the bank’s head of Corporate Communication, Olusola Longe-Okenimkpe said it recently carried out resource optimisation exercise which led to the disengagement of poor performing staffers from the bank, and this is aimed at ensuring only the best hands are retained in the system to render a true standard service to its growing clientele.
“The key criteria that guided the recent exercise in the bank was the performance record of affected staffers which span over time.”
The management, however, pledged to make adequate arrangement on how the affected staff will be compensated.
The Enterprise Bank and Keystone Bank are among financial service companies taken over by Assets Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON) years back and since the taking over, the managements have since downsized it’s workforce three times or more. Some managerial policies and the advent of cashless transactions have made some of these workers redundant.
