Cost Reduction Strategies While Upholding Effectiveness and Efficiency at Workplace

Reducing cost while upholding effectiveness and efficiency can be a challenge to many people be it at home or in our work places. Getting the best value for your money also comes at a cost. Many people would develop cost reduction strategy without taking into consideration the long term effect on the values of their programs, goods and services. When coming up with money saving strategy there should be no compromise at all cost otherwise you will end up spending more. The following techniques would help an individual or organization to reduce cost

1.    Recycling envelopes

When writing letters, you should categories them on the basis of their importance, this will guide you on the type of envelope to use, official letters should be sealed in new envelopes while non officials letters one should be able to recycled an envelope, this you will save that money for buying the envelope. The logic is you will be reducing the volume of envelopes in your house, office while at the same time using them to package your letter. It might look like a small money being saved but in 5 year strategy by just saving $3 per week for five years you shall have said ( $3*52*5=780), or you shall have spend that much to purchase new envelopes worth $3

2.    Bad photocopies made into rough pads

When printed materials that you consider not very much importance or are for your personal consumption, use your left over copies materials to print on the free space

3.    Print only final copies not drafts

If you have to print an official or any document that you need for consumption, it is advisable to print only the final document. Doing this will save you printing ink and paper and this eliminate a double spending. What you can read on the screen do not print unless it is necessary to do so

4. Printing of reports should be done on both pages

When printing develops a habit of printing on both sides of the paper, you will use few papers to produce a large document. This strategy helps you save money on papers as you would use 100 papers to print a 200 pager document.

5. Emails should be used for correspondence instead of postage

This is an area where many people can reduce cost by using email for correspondence rather than a postage channel. Many people write lot of nonsense or forward emails to friends that do not add value to them and their friends, you will be spending money that you would rather saved money

6. Maximize on office, space to accommodate more work stations

Big office space that are not utilized will cost you money for no reasons, you will be having item like electricity being consumed by unwanted devices

7. Interruptions during work hours should be avoided

When you are frequently getting interrupted you will be wasting a lot of productive time that can be put into good practice, avoid such disturbances from fellow workers for more out, time is money and using it wrongly is not the best way to reduce cost

8. Long chat using phone calls should be limited

When making a telephone call take the first 5 minutes to convey your message, after five minutes you shut down the phone and do other things, but ironically people spend the first five minutes not passing the message and end up using the phone for 10 minutes to say something that they would have done in 2 minutes

9. Office sharing whenever a partnering organization is in the others locale. Consumption quarters should be held to review whether the organization is overspending or not

10. Performance target should be put in place for staff to bring out their effort to the optimum.

11. Tapping and leveraging on staff’s talent before bringing in experts

What your staff members can offer do not outsource from other people; this will help save money and empower your staff resulting into a high out put

12.    Buy water filters instead of mineral water

Going for water filters is less expensive than buying bottled mineral water for each person in the organization

13.    Resell old news papers

Do not through old newspapers you have in your office, and always ensure that you collected all the available newspapers for the organization for resell for some money

14.    Conduct trainings in house whenever it can be done

There should be an in house training to help staff understand ways to reduce cost on their expenditure as an individual