Cost cutting in a recession can be a case of short-term savings for long-term ruin. It would be nice to think that I have made these up. Sadly, I am not that creative. These are all real examples of recession insanity.
- Automatically turn off the lights and heating at 6pm — saves money, saves carbon, saves the world. And ensures no-one works too long, which will suit your more committed competitors very well. When the firm goes bust you can turn out the lights for good.
- End free coffee, put in a full-price vending machine. This symbolic change will be a rounding error in the annual report but helps upset all your staff and ensures that informal flow of information by the coffee machine dries up. Communications gets worse, but someone somewhere will be able to tick another box in their cost-saving campaign.
- Close the subsidised company canteen. This will ensure that all the staff leave the premises to get lunch, which will take them twice as long as eating in the canteen downstairs.
- Start charging divisions for all central services — laptops, mobile phones, HR services, etc. This shifts costs from the centre, but does not save any money. It probably increases costs, because now everyone gets to argue about what the transfer price should be and whether they can go to another vendor. But at least a functionary in the centre can show that central costs have gone down.
- Ditch the Freephone number and make your customers use a premium-rate number for contacting you. This saves huge amounts of money because you normally find you have fewer customers to serve — they all defect to your competitors.
- Replace the call centre with an internet site, an call it “customer-centric service” or “putting the customer in control”. If the pesky customers still insist on calling, make sure they talk to a computer whose main message is “We value your call…please hold…because we cannot be bothered to spend money staffing the call centre sufficiently to talk to you”.
- Introduce a zero-tolerance expenses policy — penalise all errors and omissions. This will greatly enhance the creativity of your staff as they find ways of retaliating and claiming what they believe is rightly theirs.
There are more demonstrations of madness that companies will invent in this recession. I look forward to hearing from you….
(Photo: Pictfactory, CC2.0)
