Leading economic indicators

The email contains the bullet, "The most up-to-date cost control and staffing reduction data anywhere!" With an exclamation point.

Who wouldn't be excited?

I took a survey somewhere on the Internet (no, you really don't know where my hands have been) and was sent the results.

Of 15,000 mill drones like me surveyed, 66% reported their Mill had not experienced layoffs in the past 12 months. Exclamation point! To paraphrase Sheila Murphy, "That is not a happy statistic."

It means 33% have.

Of those 33% who said yes, up to 25% of their service workforce had been reduced. Or as we say in software, "reductized." AND... say the majority of those 33%, other jobs in their Mill have not been cut. Service work can be easier to automate than most jobs at your Mill, but they are 40K jobs, so you usually have to eliminate a lot of them to make a dent in the payroll and benefits.

Question5:
"Excluding lay offs, what are some ways you are saving operating costs in this economy? "

Here are my favorite picks from 6 pages of verbatim for ways companies are "saving operating costs" besides firing you. Keep in mind, these were submitted by the workers themselves and are probably spun differently from the Corner Office.

Call it trickle down. You should be feeling these soon, next time you need some tech support.


We are trying to reduce the communication cost by changing our toll free number to chargeable number.
Hiring people who are willing to work on lower wages.
Link incentive strictly to customer satisfaction and productivity.
Guiding client members to the website.
Offer rewards to agents who want to go home.
Decrease the service level.
10% reduction in salaries for exempt employees.
Desk sharing. (like it should get any smaller)
We concentrate more on the small but stable accounts
We strictly enforce multitasking.
We will not measure our service level and/or other contact center performance indicator.
We have cut back on recruiting expenses by going with cheaper options.
Keeping training costs down.
Put more work onto the agents we currently have with us.
We're not allowing any overtime.
asking employees to do more with less
Assigning more responsibilities to the leadership team so that additional hiring is not required.

Have a meaningful day, fellow workers.