In our previous article, we discussed the unpleasant business of playing “what if?” with your organization and determining how to rearrange your workforce as a result of downsizing. In this entry, we explore how to attempt to maintain a consistent level of pre-downsize output, despite the decreased size of the workforce.
So what do you do when there are simply not enough people to get all of your work done? Your workforce is no longer as large as it once was, but the workload remains unchanged. What do you do?
The last thing you’d want to do is scale back core activities and effectively downsize your entire business. Instead, there are three things that you should do:
Cut “Loser” Projects
Core activities should never cease, but you as a manager should immediately identify a number of “loser” projects to eliminate from your team’s workload. Projects are typically new initiatives that are not considered to be a “core activity” until they have demonstrated that they can create positive returns.
“Loser” projects must be cut, and they fall into one of two camps:
- Projects that will never be able to realistically provide a return
- And projects that will generate returns but simply cost too much to implement during the current unstable economic climate.
It’s easy to spot projects in the first camp; they’re the byproduct of traditional, vague, ineffective project management techniques.
For example, a project is projected to take one month to complete at a cost of $50,000 dollars and it will produce $10,000 worth of savings per month from that point onward. Sounds great on paper, but it’s been four months and the project has cost $200,000 thus far—and it’s expected to take another two months to complete. So instead of paying for itself in five months, the project will pay for itself in 30 months. But by then, the problem solved by this project will probably be a non-issue, so this project is never going to produce a real return. It’s a loser. Cut it.
The second type of project that needs to be cut is the one that will eventually produce a positive return, but have an upfront cost that is simply too expensive under the new circumstances. If you have a project which will take four members of your eight-person team 12 months to complete and 36 months to pay for itself with new revenue generated, then you really should consider cutting the project—under the circumstances, you don’t have time to wait.
Spread Responsibilities and Cross-Train Remaining Employees
In our example from our recent post, we downsized from this organizational chart:
To this one:
Our marketing communications (MarCom) department lost a mid-level manager, a graphic artist, and a webmaster. We have seven people to complete the work of ten—what do we do?
One approach is to cross-train employees to fulfill multiple roles in your organization. Let’s use an example:
Robert the copywriter does a decent job, but he spends a lot of his time waiting on his manager and the technical writer. Robert has demonstrated some layout and design potential in the past; he could be trained in a reasonably short period of time to pick up some of the graphic design responsibilities that belonged to Basil, who was recently terminated.
Cross-training is simply a method of load-balancing the workload on your remaining employees by having them apply their proficiencies in new areas of responsibility. In particular, you should consider cross-training employees who have large amounts of “wait time” or “dead time” between assignments.
Standardize Best Practices
The final technique for getting by with less people is one that we have harped on constantly throughout the lifespan of this blog: take the best practices for completing core tasks in your operations and make them standard operating procedures for all employees.
Streamlining best practices allows you to increase the productivity of every employee substantially and helps you maintain a steady level of output, despite the decreased size of your workforce.
Even though it may be challenging to maintain a consistent level of output in the wake of a downsizing, it’s far from impossible. Managers simply need to look for opportunities to cut bad projects, rebalance their teams' workloads, determine what the best practices are, and standardize them.
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