How you can survive without firing your workforce during these times?

We are in the beginning of lock down 3.0. Although some of the industries are allowed to operate albeit some restriction. Most of us are still home bound wondering when all this will get over.

When life as we know it will return? is anybody’s guess. But one thing for sure, for millions, life will never be the same. This is because around 82 out of 100 people do not work in Infosys and TCS of the world.

Our urban landscape is build on the backs of small and medium scale enterprise. These small enterprises are supported by millions of blue collar migrant workers. Since these small and medium companies has gone into a ‘survival’ mode. There is a real danger that these labors will not be able find employment even after the lock down is lifted.

This is not to blame their employers, as they too are in the middle of uncertain times with no income for such a long period of time and continuous expenses like EMI, rent, etc looming over their head. The easiest thing they can think of is rationalizing the work force. This reality further gets augmented in the labor intensive sectors like offline retail and textile.

There is however, a silver lining in this period of gloom. As the economy will take its time to get back to feet. These small companies have time to analyse which are the major cost drivers. This may not necessary be employee cost.

Here, those firms who have maintained data the way it should are in immediate competitive advantage over others. Because now they can study which are the unnecessary expenses they are incurring which they can eliminate for the time being. Further, with data visualization they can augment this advantage even more. As this will enable them to identify these expenses easily. Hence, speeding up their decision making process of eliminating this wasteful expenditure.

The above waterfall chart quickly tells you what are your fixed and variable cost. You can drill down and see what are the few variable cost head which can be reduce or eliminated. Further, you can also drill down on fixed cost and see if there is anything for which you are paying without getting satisfactory return.

This cost rationalization can reduce or even eliminate the need of work force rationalization.

Firing people in this time of crisis will only lead to bad PR. This will hamper your top line in the long run. As your customer will not perceive you to be a responsible business. This long term loss will far outweigh your short term gain.

“Do business intelligently and responsibly“. This true statement of normal times gains more significance in the times we are in.

Perfview is helping you by creating your first dashboard for free. To help business like yours rationalize your cost.

Stay safe!!