Four Legitimate Ways to Cut Staff Costs
Any owner in a crisis is concerned about the question of how to legally reduce the costs of employees and not offend them too much. Keep 4 relevant ways.
Change the work schedule
Depending on the specifics, you can vary the work schedule. It will be more profitable for someone to hire new workers in order not to pay overtime, for someone to set a shift schedule, and for someone to switch to a part-time or vice versa to a six-day working week.
Increase productivity
With the help of time tracking systems, you can analyze the work and identify bottlenecks or insufficient workloads. If employees cope with the work in 2-3 hours, it is worth reviewing the number of staff and increasing the number of tasks for the remaining ones.
If the analysis showed that employees spend a lot of time on routine tasks, it is worth automating these processes. Conversation scripts, algorithms, rules of interaction between departments, as well as a CRM system in which data on transactions and clients will be stored will help here.
With the help of well-established business processes, it will be possible to save time, redistribute the load, reduce the number of employees and, as a result, reduce personnel costs.
Optimize staff
It is necessary to sensibly assess the number of employees and determine how and who can be reduced. You can analyze costs in online financial and management accounting services.
Correlate the salary costs of an employee (or department) with their efficiency and decide how it is more profitable to pay for work: piece-by-piece or according to the time worked.
Other optimization options:
- various services like PEO service in India may help to significantly decrease costs related to staff hiring;
- staff rotation: you can transfer staff depending on the workload to different branches, so as not to dismiss old employees and not hire new ones.
- transferring part of the tasks to freelancers: a full-time copywriter can be employed for only half of the working time and receives a salary in full. By transferring this task to a freelancer, you will be able to save money.
- outsourcing: for example, hire a cleaning company that will take over all the functions of maintaining cleanliness, so as not to pay a salary (and contributions from it) to a cleaner who works one hour. This is not a panacea — an outsourcer company also pays salaries to employees, and even earns on services, so the expediency of this option needs to be calculated.
Reduce other expenses
Many companies include travel expenses, gym classes, catering in social packages. You can save on employee training if employees are not required to take mandatory courses. In other cases, the company has the right to set limits on training, highlight the main directions and calculate what is more profitable — to teach people independently, invite a coach or improve their skills using online courses.
Corporate parties, of course, make the team more friendly, but is it worth spending money if the company is forced to cut staff in order to survive?
Everyone understands that a difficult time will pass, and it will not be easy to find a new team of specialists. Shifting the payment of non-working days to employers, untimely and limited assistance, forced closure for many companies, and uncertainty — all this is a heavy burden for business. Those who can bear it with dignity will not be afraid of anything.