Google searches for “how to cut business costs” recently soared by 202%.

A closer look reveals 75% of CEOs predict declining growth in the year ahead. The result is many companies turn to layoffs to cut back on their expenses. An oft-overlooked way to cut costs without employee layoffs is to collaborate with employees to find creative cost-cutting solutions.

Invest In Cross-Training To Fill Needed Roles

One way to avoid layoffs is through the cross-training of existing team members. According to Eugen von Rubinberg, co-founder and co-CEO at Vidby, a Swiss, AI-based voice-translation solutions company, enhancing team members' skill sets helps businesses become more versatile and adapt to changing circumstances without having to do layoffs — it worked for Vidby.

“We are like many companies in that we constantly see our needs change as the business market changes. For example, in one situation, we had two quality-assurance (QA) specialists. We knew we could downsize to one position, but that would mean a layoff. Instead of a layoff, we worked with employees to see if we could train them to work in other areas of the company where we did have an opening — this meant investing in cross-training.”

The QA specialist ultimately took on a role as a project manager.

von Rubinberg is bullish on cross-training as a viable option for avoiding layoffs: “The benefits of cross-training are well worth the investment. Team members are already familiar with our company and our processes. And cross-training allows us to avoid many of the teething problems we normally see when we bring on a new hire.”

In most cases, Konovalov reports cross-training also saves Vidby time and money: “Our human-resources (HR) department and a team of advisers lead the cross-training process. By having HR collaborate with the hiring department, we are able to ramp up team members in their new roles fairly quickly. In a recent example, retraining saved Vidby five months of salary — the three months a recruiter would have taken and the two months a new employee would’ve spent on adaptation and probation.”

Ask Your Team And Suppliers For Cost-Saving Ideas

A second way to cut costs without letting people go is collaborating with team members and suppliers for creative ways to save money. Greg Moody, an executive director at JLL, shares how working with a service provider can yield significant cost savings:

“Our engineers, facility managers and project managers are typically the first to identify an opportunity. We cultivate a culture of ‘see something, do something’ where team members are empowered to act. Recently, our team was decommissioning a sizable data center for a client. The team on the ground identified an opportunity to redeploy many of the physical assets to support another need that the client had elsewhere in the portfolio. This one idea alone generated cost savings of over half-a-million dollars.”

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