When times are tough –as is the case of the current crisis- cost-cutting decisions are often made from a desk, without taking into consideration the suggestions of those who do the daily operational work and therefore, know the job better.
The first measure taken (and this is already a classic!) is cutting on coffee, copies and office boys. Then other measures follow that account for the bad mood of staff members, since they often come in conflict with their daily activities.
How do staff members interpret the reality of your company? Do they feel that…
– their opinion is not valued,
– they can lose their job at any time,
– they cannot express themselves out of fear of “ridiculing themselves”?
To sum up: They feel undervalued and afraid of everything they say and do. At the same time, they feel they don’t have the necessary tools to be able to comply with their objectives and those of the organization. Furthermore, they see that money keeps getting wasted on other things that make no sense.
To tackle these problems, we have developed internal communication actions in different companies aimed at improving the organization by means of the knowledge that staff members have about the processes, optimizing resources and money.
The benefit of implementing these campaigns is noticeable since staff members:
– know where the money is wasted,
– not only integrate and accept the cost-cutting but they develop it,
– are valued and listened to,
– feel part of the decisions made by the company,
– find unthinkable solutions or savings that could be even disregarded by consultants because they consider them ridiculous (in one firm one administrative staff member questioned why the company was printing a process four times if they could send the copy by e-mail to each Department involved. This way, this individual ended up saving a huge amount of space, toner and paper per year!)
– feel that the organization takes them into account.
Here is a question we have asked staff members more than once: Why haven’t you mentioned this before? And the answer we usually got was: “Because you never asked”. Staff members have the knowledge but perhaps lack the initiative to offer a solution, either out of fear, because they feel excluded or simply because they “didn’t think about saying it”.
Even though out of the many proposals we have received throughout the years, saving may be considered minor (let us recall the saying “take care of the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves”), adding up all the ideas was always greater than the saving measures previously established by the organization.