How to get staff support for cost cutting initiatives

Everywhere you turn public sector organisations are actively pursuing plans to take tens of £millions out of their costs over the next few years.  This will almost certainly impact on headcount and can give rise to fear and uncertainty amongst the staff in these organisations.

Short term savings that are made indiscriminately by slashing headcount could prove to be false when the cost of de-motivated staff working in stressful, under resourced processes that can no longer meet customer requirements comes to light.

How Lean Can Help

Throughout the public sector there are huge opportunities for doing more with less.  Lean Thinking has been shown to be effective in identifying and stripping out the waste and blockages to flow that cause inefficiencies and poor performance.

However, for Lean to deliver to its full potential and be sustainable, it must be done by the people working in the processes that need improved.  You cannot do Lean to people.

Engaging the Workforce

Engaging people and getting them to change the way they do things is hard enough in the good times, when there is no threat of job losses.  It is even more difficult to make this connection in today’s climate.

Everyone understands the size of the financial challenges now facing the country and that cuts are inevitable.  It is the way this translates to their world that will make the difference between them engaging or not.  Now, more than ever, they need to see what engaging or not engaging will mean for them and the people they care about.

One Approach to Encourage Engagement

One way that lowers the barriers to staff getting involved is to select areas for improvement where successful outcomes will produce non staff related cost reductions which will in turn reduce pressure to cut headcount in order to achieve savings targets.  This frees the staff to focus on the task in hand without fear.

An example of this is the collection of outstanding debt which requires a two prong attack.  The first prong is a focus on the debt collection process to reduce the outstanding debt thereby reducing interest charges for the organisation.  The second prong is about taking steps to stop debt accumulating in the first place.

Customers are much more prepared to pay bills which are correct in every way.  Applying a “right first time every time” approach will produce a billing to collection process which is much more effective, fairer on the customers and far less stressful for the staff.

Breaking the Vicious Circle

Public sector absence continues to stay well above the private sector levels.  There is a danger that the cuts in headcount being forced on the public sector will result in poorer services.  This in turn could give rise to unhappy customers who then inflict more stress on front line employees who take more time off sick resulting in even more stress all round.

With a Lean approach, an organisation has a chance to engage the remaining staff in stripping out waste and blockages to flow in their current process and designing and implementing new ways that will give better service with less stress.

Once staff start to see that this is the reality of Lean, they will be more inclined to sign up to become involved in making things better for all stakeholders rather than accepting an unpleasant alternative.

Helping People See the Possibilities

If there is anyone reading this who has examples of Lean in action in these difficult times please share them with a view to inspiring others to get started on their win, win, win journey.

If you found this of interest you may want to check out Gregg Stocker’s blog article ‘Instead of a Layoff‘ published on 6^th July 2010 which has particular relevance to this discussion.