“The cuts will leave HSBC with about 208,000 full-time equivalent staff by 2017, down from 295,000 at the end of 2010 and 258,000 at the end of 2014...", although the bank said it will be hiring in growth businesses and its compliance division.

The cuts are part of a second attempt by Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver to boost profits since he took the helm at the start of 2011.

‘Slaughtering the staff is not necessarily the solution unless management makes the bank considerably less complex,’ said James Antos, analyst at Mizuho Securities Asia.”

Source – uk.reuters.com 9th June 2015

There aren’t many of us who could cut our staff headcount by 50,000!

I think we can all agree that boosting profit is desirable. But cutting staff, not so desirable – especially in an SME, where staff tend to be more loyal, long serving and quite often part of the ‘family’ of the company.

So if we can’t take the HSBC approach to boosting profit, what can we do?

The trick is to increase the amount of business that we are doing but WITHOUT adding to the head count and staff costs. That means looking at the business differently, reconsidering your current processes. For example, could I get 10% or 20% or 50% of my customer’s orders to be placed online if I had the right website? Sure it would need to be integrated to my accounts system, and know about credit limits, special pricing and product details, but then I would free up time from my telesales staff. They could refocus their efforts on calling customers that haven’t ordered recently, have reduced the amount they order, even drum up some new business! Or any number of pro-active activities that could add even more business (and profit) – all without hiring more staff!

This is just one example of how you could reconsider your processes, but based on the hundreds of businesses we have worked with, I’m sure there are hundreds more processes to look at.

It’s always worth thinking about how to improve the profitability of your business – especially through the application of technology. – Not necessarily by shedding a whole load of staff!