The profit measures at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank may turn out to be pretty scrappy, in light of the bank's appeal to staff to agree to take 10 days unpaid leave over the next 12 months.The bank yesterday confirmed a report in the Bendigo Advertiser of the request, sent in an email to staff on Tuesday. The appeal for volunteers to take leave applies to staff directly employed by the bank and not to staff of franchised community banks.The preference for unpaid leave is akin to the labour cost management more common in sectors of the manufacturing industry and at odds with practice at larger banks where redundancies are the norm to meet centrally driven efficiency targets. Unpaid leave also has the virtue of preserving a degree of staff goodwill and saving the bank from recruiting and training staff in the event that demand picks up.But it's a shrinking balance sheet, and slackening levels of new business that are the bank's chief problems.In the eight months since September 2008 (and roughly the post-Lehman period) Bendigo's rate of growth in loans and advances was only 1.5 per cent, according to an ABN Amro assessment of monthly APRA data.The average rate of growth for major banks was nine per cent.On residential lending, Bendigo reported a decline of more than four per cent in the four months to May 2009 compared with banking sector growth of seven per cent (and growth rates of around 15 per cent for Commonwealth and Westpac).Bendigo is not faring as badly on deposits, though it has recently lagged the sector on household deposits.