As a general rule, one of the largest expenditures that a typical company makes is in the hiring and paying of personnel. While technology and infrastructure costs might also be enormous, generally speaking it is paying employees a salary that takes up the largest chunk of resources of a typical company operating in the world today.
While you should try and avoid mass lay-offs unless there are no other options left to pursue, there are ways that you can save a little bit of money here and there by trimming the hedges a little bit. One strategy that you can employee is to rotate employee shifts, taking a handful of employees and letting them off work one or two hours early on Friday. If you rotate this throughout the different people that are working, you can save a few hours of salary once a week and the rotation should ensure that people do not lose so much of their work that it makes it difficult for them to continue working for you at the current rate of work and pay that you give them.
Strategies like this often have the added effect of increasing employee morale, something that directly contributes to higher productivity. This in turn can allow you to add a permanent rotated employee shift situation into your business until the economy turns around. While it will not save nearly as much money as mass lay-offs, it will keep morale high and might just save enough in conjunction with other cost saving measures that your company can get through the current hard times.
A big mistake that is made by a number of people during economic downturns is to layoff employees starting at the bottom of the chain. While it may surprise you to learn this, only the very large corporations can actually get away with this and even then they only do it to protect senior employees as opposed to doing it because it benefits their bottom line.
The simple fact of the matter as far as small and medium businesses are concerned is that keeping lower rung employees is a lot cheaper than keeping management and since management tends to be hired in larger quantities than necessary anyway, laying off some management employees can serve to save you a large amount of money while at the same time ensuring that your management employees end up working at peak productivity. It is a nice way to kill two birds with one stone and it could save you tens of thousands of dollars each year.
Money like that could easily be the difference between the sky and the grave for a small business and therefore it is something you should definitely consider if the company falls on hard times. Businesses do have a moral imperative to its employees in times of economic downturn however, so make sure that all other options have been exhausted before you act on this option.
Bloggy Biz is a blog that prides itself on having answers to a lot of common questions that people might pose. These are not the same answers that you would hear from business executives however. Instead, they are common sense answers that are easy to implement and even easier to monitor and maintain. These are exactly the types of answers that people are looking for in these hard times and the next month will be dedicated towards helping you manage your business in a recession the likes of which most people of this generation have never seen.
Inflation
Before those tips start however, something that you need to realize is that times are likely going to be tough for awhile. The world has languished on fossil fuel and innovation in the energy industry is only now starting to jump start after a few decades of being at an all time low. Therefore, the first goal of your business should be survival until things pick up again. All other concerns are secondary. If you are aware of the tough times that are ahead, know that they are going to do bad things to your company and personally commit to doing whatever it takes to make sure your business gets through alive, then you are already in a better position than most other small business executives.
With that in mind, the next posts will cover some suggestions for managing your business and saving some money.
Recession is something that is apparent and for most people today, knowing when and if they should invest their assets at the moment seems to be something that has taken them aback. With the world’s economy practically breaking down, would you risk making investments to still get profit?
Apparently you can. But it will take more than using your money and references to make the wise choices. Here is a video that can help. All of us should be wise to make sure that whatever assets we have now go towards the right places at the right time.
While convincing the boss might be something that is difficult to do, an arguably harder proposition might be convincing yourself. It is quite possible that you are a fan of Bloggy Biz and have been reading the last month’s worth of posts with an amused expression on your face because you do not seriously believe that telecommuting could ever be helpful in your situation.
Well, if this sounds like you, then you need to convince yourself that telecommuting is worthwhile. The best way to do this is to consider the alternatives. Driving to work is what created the financial mess in the first place, since your car is running on gasoline. Buying a scooter or a new car would be extremely expensive and even if you can afford it, the increased mileage would only put you back in this situation within a year or two. Carpooling can be difficult at times, for reasons that have already been covered before.
That only leaves you with two options. These two options are mass transit and telecommuting. Mass transit is a great idea, but most people in the world do not live in areas where mass transit even exists, let alone is good enough to get you where you need to go. And even those that do will acknowledge that mass transit does have days of too many people and too many delays. If you take a terrible mass transit system to work for a week, I’d be willing to bet that telecommuting will start to become a lot more attractive quickly.
