Cutting Costs for Dummies

Cutting costs is a tough job. It’s difficult. It won’t make you many friends among coworkers. And it begs you to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When the company announces a new policy, which sucks, but at least will bring them some money they need, it’s most likely an e-mail addressed to everyone saying something like that:

Hello headcount,

Kind regards,
Yours Truly Cost Cutting Department

Yes, that’s the worst possible way of doing that. And somehow that’s also the most popular one. This is wrong on so many levels.

• You don’t give managers a chance to prepare people in a human way to incoming unpleasant change. Sure, in a big organization there are probably a bunch of directors who don’t care. Maybe the whole rest would appreciate when given the chance to avoid ruining their teams’ morale? Nah, they don’t care about that.

• You don’t explain people why it’s done. People don’t like to be treated as mindless golems. I’m not quite sure why, but it seems they just don’t. Maybe that’s the need of feeling important? Who knows?

• You don’t limit information to interested ones only. You spread the doom all over the place. Let them talk about that. Let it be the news of the month. Maybe that will affect their productivity but you can’t be sure.

• You don’t point exactly who is the subject of the policy. All the managers trying to explain their people that the e-mail is a bit too general and someone must have made a mistake accidentally will be grateful. In other case they would have to actually manage their teams, which is so boring. I guess.

You can take that all a bit further if you want. You can announce the cost-cutting idea to those who won’t be affected. Later you can explain them it was an accident and there’s no problem – they don’t need to change anything. You lower morale and productivity and gain no savings. Congratulations. Test passed.

Tagged as: communication, cutting costs, failure, team management, work environment