Strategic Efficiency Enrolment – Gaining Efficiencies Without Reducing Headcount

In a downturn people are more important than ever.

The challenge for 09? How to make your business efficient whilst looking after your people.

In previous downturns, many employers focussed heavily on reducing labour costs as a way of maintaining bottom line performance. Some of these labour reduction strategies lacked dignity and were in retrospect poorly managed. As a result, when the economy recovered, the organisation was left with a major labour problem. Existing employees left as the job market picked up, and the company having developed a reputation as an employer who had failed to look after their employees, found it difficult to attract good people.

But of course we can learn from this experience. Reducing head count is not the only, or even often the best way, to reduce expenses. There is a new way – it is called Strategic Efficiency Enrolment or ‘SEE’. Click here to read more about this approach. We like this approach. Over 2009 we will be exploring it further but its general principles are as follows:

Work with your employees to identify and capture costs savings – they know better than you where these savings can be gained, but they often won’t be revealed if ultimately it costs them their job. We discuss strategies to build the required enrolment, identify and capture these savings.

If labour costs do need to be reduced (and this should be a last resort) then a special management approach is required. Best practice strategies for this most painful of decisions are discussed.

Remember many junior managers have never managed in a downturn.

Spend even more attention on your workforce – do not pull back – during times of uncertainty we all need even better communication, even better leadership – we will discuss these themes and more.

Ultimately employers will fall broadly into two camps – those who manage this downturn and its impact on labour effectively, with humanity and with dignity, working with their people, not against them and,

Those who cut as a first response strategy with little or no regard to those who leave or those who stay.

History shows that the performance of organisations who fall in this latter category fall way behind those in the first.

I know that we are all passionate about our people and our organisational culture - during difficult times we need to look after our people like never before if we want to maintain their loyalty, focus, productivity and goodwill.

Source: COI Group