How to Keep the Lid on Staff Costs

For most (if not all) businesses, the cost of hiring and managing staff is a significant cost. But if staff are essential to your success, what can you do to keep this cost under control without impacting the quality of your service or product?

Here are a few tips to help you ensure you have any efficient staffing structure:

1. 1. When you need to fill a position, start with your staff. They will often be able to recommend friends or associates that may be right for the job. If that doesn’t work, the internet generally provides the lowest-cost, highest-reach ratio for filling common positions. Newspaper advertising is more costly and only effective for the one day of publication, rather than appearing online for a period of time.
   2. Ensure new staff are welcomed into the business. Make sure you give them a proper overview of your policies and expectation up front so they can get off on the right foot. Assigning a ‘buddy’ can be a good way to help them integrate with the existing staff. Staff turnover equals higher costs so getting them started well increases the likelihood of them staying.
   3. Training costs money, but the cost of not training is higher. Make sure you have an effective, structured – but not laborious, training program for new staff. Break down training into consumable parts that build over time.
   4. When managing shift-based businesses, carefully consider how and when you use casual versus full time staff. In some situations casual staff can be more expensive that full time staff. Also ensure your shifts are managed by position types, not by staff names, to ensure you are always covered in key areas.
   5. Think about outsourcing for certain jobs like cleaning where your staff don’t like doing it and are not very good at it.
   6. Give staff a performance goal focused on watching costs and wastage. Encourage a culture that seeks and encourages efficiency.
   7. For tasks that are repetitive and frequent, set expectations on the time those tasks should take.

There are plenty of other ways to trim costs and increase efficiency. Look out for future posts as we explore other commons ways to save costs.