15 Business Cost Savings For The Workplace
Finding business cost savings can be a thankless task. No one wants to be a penny pincher, but sometimes it’s the tough decision that makes or breaks a business. Finding the right savings keeps a business sustainable, protecting livelihoods and supporting your customers. With the following 15 tips, some luck, and some business instincts, you can spend smarter and make your hard-earned cash go further.
Audit Your Expenses to Find Business Cost Savings
You can’t make savings without a clear picture of your expenses. Auditing your expenses helps you form the best plans for business cost savings. Look over your past year’s outgoings to figure out where you’re wasting resources and where to reinvest. Digital cost analysis solutions make this process easier and more effective. Rather than looking at the size of each expense, work out what’s essential and what’s disproportionately expensive and work from there.
Get Your Employees On-Side
While finding business cost savings can be difficult, getting everyone aligned on the same goal is even tougher. To succeed with making savings, you need to reframe the issue and help the team pull together. If savings keep the company growing, they keep your employees in a job. In that sense, you’re already on their side. Expressing the need for cost efficiency in a calm, encouraging way helps get the business pulling in the right direction.
Offering incentives can actually help boost morale and optimise expenses. While perks, trips, and bonuses cost money to fund, they often end up paying for themselves, sometimes even generating value. Consider setting up a prize for the best business cost savings idea amongst your employees. This draws from their front-line knowledge while showing that they’re worthwhile. Incentivising work retreats based on sales and performance also creates revenue as your employees compete for efficiency and output.
Break Down Departmental Siloes
On the topic of employee management and business cost savings, encouraging communication and teamwork between departments goes a long way. You’ll often find businesses where someone has never met anyone from another department. In cases like that, they’ll never know if they’re doubling up on tasks and wasting time and effort when they could be helping each other. Interdepartmental cooperation lays the foundation for efficiency and business cost savings.
Embed Business Cost Savings into Your Company Culture
Business cost savings arrive little by little, and they’re never one and done. Making cost-efficiency part of your company culture helps reduce waste and stay on top of expenses. If you have a written company DNA, consider making cost efficiency part of your mantra. Make it a focus for your finance team and senior leadership, and chair regular meetings to stay ship-shape.
Embrace hybrid and remote working
Remote working changed the game all across the workplace, and business expenditure is no exception. Hybridity lets your employees thrive at home, staying happy and productive while unlocking plenty of business savings. Fewer people in the office means fewer bills for the office and more room in the budget where it’s needed most.
Consider Your Location
COVID-era workplace hybridity lead many business leaders to question their office locations. Whether you’re downsizing, moving to a more affordable area, or renegotiating with the building owners, there are plenty of options to save on expenses while you save on space.
Utilise the Right Utilities
Energy prices always fluctuate, but you might have been stuck with the same provider for decades. Exploring the market for all your utilities, from water to wi-fi, lets you know if you’re getting ripped off or if there are business cost savings to be had. Even if you stick with the same providers, you can always negotiate better rates for your loyalty.
Negotiate Business Cost Savings With Your Vendors
Just like your utilities, negotiation is key to the best rates. Businesses often use a range of vendors, and just as pizzerias buy dough and mozzarella, software companies buy data and digital storage. Yours might well be a buyer’s market, so shop around for some savings.
Keep an Eye on Business Waste
The most efficient businesses keep a tight leash on their physical, as well as financial, outgoings. If you find yourself throwing away too much stock, equipment, or food, it’s time to re-evaluate. Too much waste either means too much purchasing or incorrect usage. Either way, you can prevent waste and save money by changing your company’s consumption.
Go Green
Cutting down on waste ties tightly in with your ethics and sustainability. Smaller ecological footprints often mean smaller bills. Consider putting a solar panel on your roof to cut your electricity bills, for example. If you’ve got a fleet of vehicles, then switching to electric or hybrid saves emissions and fuel costs. Crucially, being green is good for the planet, and it’s great PR. Your green savings could also pay for themselves as an attractive selling point to new hires, customers, and investors alike.
Switch to Cloud Storage
You don’t need to store all your business documentation on paper, and you don’t even need to keep it in hard drives anymore either. Switching to cloud storage saves you plenty of space when you get rid of your bulky hardware. It also saves on maintenance and purchase costs.
Create Business Cost Savings by Digitising Manual Admin Tasks
Software solutions mean your employees don’t have to spend all of their time copy-pasting customer data. Instead, Customer Relationship Management systems, HR systems, LMS systems and other software help you focus your time on high-value tasks. Seeing which works best for your team helps you unlock serious business cost savings.
Streamline Your Rotas With a Time and Attendance System
Sorting out shifts, holidays, overtime, and work delegation costs businesses countless hours when they could be generating revenue. Scheduling errors also lead to costly emergency overtime, a disgruntled workforce, and inefficiently managed customers. A smart time and attendance system solves all these problems, making it a valuable investment for optimised businesses.
Employ Ambitious Early-Career Starters
Careers, like businesses, start with someone taking a chance. Hiring capable, confident, yet relatively inexperienced early-career employees fills your business with ambition, creativity, and energy. This strategy also puts early-career wages on your books rather than the higher salaries of more experienced professionals. Starting relationships with your employees earlier in their careers also leaves room for them to grow and upskill with your business, creating tailored career progress and a cost-efficient workforce.
Solidify Business Cost Savings With Staff and Client Retention
On the subject of hiring, streamlined businesses know that it often costs far more money to find and train a new employee than it does to keep your existing cohort happy. The same goes for customers. Keep an eye on your customer acquisition costs (CAC) compared to lifetime value (LTV), so you know where to invest. Then apply the same concept across the business, from infrastructure to equipment to furniture. Thinking long-term, and prioritising value, prioritises output and business cost savings.
Conclusions
Business cost savings involve a mixture of cutting back wasteful costs and spending wisely on cost-saving investments. Efficient software solutions, staff, and equipment all help you optimise your costs.