Creeping interest rates, inflation at an all-time high, and an ever-lasting SaaS winter. 2023 is looking pretty bleak for many SMBs. The year has led many businesses to look at alternative ways to save money, and this task often falls on three departments:
- Finance
- Operations
- HR
In this article, we’ll explore how HR teams can start saving money in the short-term and investing in smarter ways for safer, more cost-efficient business growth.
HR Money Saving Tactics You Can Implement in Your Staff Management Strategies
With inflation rates being so high, and the value of cash decreasing so drastically, finance teams will need to invest smarter to better enable their operations and management of the business. With that being said, we’ve rounded up seven services you can look at implementing in HR to save your business cash in the long-run.
Psst. It all starts with retention!
Calculate Your per Diem Rate for Business Trips With Travelperk
If your team needs to travel for their work, then now’s a good time to reassess the budget you’re assigning them for different types of trips. A per diem rate is the rate you should be paying for a traveling employee to cover their lodging, meals, and any necessary payments in order to do their job on the go.
Different states across the USA have different per diem rates as they’re calculated based on average cost of living in certain areas and other factors. In light of trying to save money, it may be a good time to streamline your employee travel allowances for different destinations.
You can use TravelPerk’s Per Diem Rate Calculator in order to understand how much you should be paying employees per business trip depending on where they’re going. This is a great service to help formalize your travel expenses policy.
Combat Churn With Wellness Initiatives
Gallup found that employee wellness contributes toward greater productivity and profitability, while reducing staff turnover—keep in mind that an employee leaving could cost your business 1-2x their yearly salary in losses, and that’s not even taking into account trying to replace them.
It’s so crucial that during worrying financial times for everyone, you’re looking after your employees and providing them with the tools and assets they need to excel in and out of the office. Low-cost wellness initiatives to consider for your team are:
- Staff on or off sites
- Online events
- Yoga and meditation classes
- Healthy in-office meal options
- Gym memberships or fitness stipends
- Free or discounted access to therapy
There are some great tools out there to help you facilitate some of these initiatives. Consider tools like Gympass, UrbanSports for gym stipends. Or services like Oliva or Headspace for mental health.
Upskill Your Talent With Shortform
A future of work report from Salesforce recently stressed the importance of upskilling talent and how it can increase productivity and increase staff retention rates—two things that every business needs in a time of such economic uncertainty.
At Shortform, your team will have access to some of the world’s most insightful non-fiction books, so they can upskill a business area they want to, at a rapid pace. Some of the most dense business books in the world are broken down into bite-size, understandable, and up-to-date topics, so your team can enjoy the learning process.
Pick from topics like:
- Management & leadership
- Money & finance
- Communication
- Productivity
Once a team member has read a Shortform guide, they’ll have the opportunity to put into practice what they’ve learned with open-ended exercises. It’s time to retain that knowledge, and retain that workforce!
Help Employees Deliver on Personal Purpose With Volunteering Time Off With Benevity
The Great Resignation was spurred by a sense of unfilled purpose that many employees realized through the pandiem. It caused 47 million people to quit their jobs, and today, purpose is a core differentiator on what helps people decide if they’re going to stay with an employee or not.
Gartner found that today, employees are looking to join employers that share a purpose similar to theirs. Which means, employers are having to showcase their purpose more, and giving employees opportunities to work towards this shared purpose.
For many companies, this comes in the form of Volunteering Time Off, VTO. This time off is typically 1-2 days throughout the calendar year in which an employee can take the time off of work in order to fulfill vetted volunteering opportunities that their employer provides. The Benevity app is a great resource to help you follow through on this initiative.
Ensure You’re Paying All Staff on Time With Branch
Scheduling staff payments, and ensuring everyone is paid on time can be timely in itself and cost your business a lot of money if you make any errors: be it in fines, complaints, or staff turnover.
At the same time, cutting out ACH and other payment fees would be a huge instant saving on your accounts. Plus, minimizing the task of cash flow monitoring and running to the bank will save your finance team time as well.
Branch is a fantastic tool to help you pay employees on-demand, run cashless tips, and grant all employees instant access to their pay with digital wallets. It’s typically used in healthcare, retail, and hospitality sectors, however, it’s proving to be a huge win for any company that’s gig and 1099 workers too.
What’s more, part of their app offers a financial wellness feature, which offers cash flow management tools to help your employees budget better and save throughout tough times. Empowering your workforce to use their salary more intelligently.
Hire Remote Employees at a Low Cost With Remotewokr
If you’re looking to expand your team with remote employees and want to find cost-effective solutions, RemoteWokr is a valuable job board platform to consider. It provides a centralized hub where businesses can connect with talented professionals who are seeking remote work opportunities.
RemoteWokr offers a wide range of job listings from various industries and skill sets, allowing you to browse and identify potential candidates that meet your specific requirements. By leveraging the platform, you can tap into a global talent pool without the need for expensive international entities or dealing with complex tax and compliance issues.
By utilizing RemoteWokr’s job board platform, you can expand your team with remote employees in a cost-effective manner, while gaining access to a diverse talent pool.
Hire Globally With One Business Entity With Remote.com
This is a huge one for SMBs working with international teams, or looking to build them. The costs of opening new entities in each country in order to hire the talent you want is extortionate. What’s more, needing to juggle foreign tax laws, payment compliance policies, and even understanding different holiday schemes can be a huge burden on your HR team, and can land your business in big financial trouble if done incorrectly.
However, perhaps you know you can get access to your talent at a much cheaper rate than hiring in the Bay Area, for example. It’s understandable you may want to be reducing costs by hiring a remote team.
Remote.com is a fantastic resource to help you hire and pay compliantly across the globe. It enables you to onboard and contract employees in minutes not months, and will even advise you on localized benefits to help ensure that talent sticks with you—for example, holidays in the USA are often a lot more appealing than in Europe due to the legal amount of holidays an employee is entitled to each year.
Closing Out: 5 Bonus Cost Reduction Tactics To Consider
If you’re looking to further reduce costs and save your business money, then here are a few more non-service orientated ways you can go about it.
- Evaluate your SaaS subscriptions: are there any subscriptions that your team begged you for but just aren’t using? Can those plans be reduced from a premium to a basic plan? If your team is on the basic plan, is there a freemium model they can go on? Assess how business-critical your SaaS is, and if it’s not, it’s time to downgrade.
- Automate cumbersome processes: if business is low, then now may be a good time to try and automate some of your more cumbersome processes. AI has come a long way in 2023, and it’s able to do a lot of the manual lifting HRs used to do. Identify what tasks you can pass the reigns over for.
- Delegate larger tasks to new starters: it may also be a good time to start delegating to newer members of the team. Traditional growth paths don’t need to be set in stone in times of crisis, if someone is ready to take on more responsibilities, rather than waiting for their time-with-team milestone, onboard them onto new projects quicker.
- Consider asset investment to reduce tax spend: if you want to save on the tax bill at the end of the financial year, then consider any assets the business needs and go get them. Things like office space, office equipment (desks, laptops, etc) . If you know you’re going to need it in the next couple of years, accelerate the timeline to buy.
- Negotiate contracts: whether that’s with service providers, office rentals, or something else. Rather than cutting contracts altogether, you’ll be surprised by the number of people that are open to negotiation. At the end of the day, they would prefer to keep you as a customer than lose you altogether.
There you have it, six services and five tactics your HR team can consider to start reducing costs for your business and survive the drought. Hopefully, you found this article useful, and have discovered a few potential pathways to explore. Remember, for HR teams, it all starts with retaining your staff. Look after your foundations so you’re able to stand strong, and even continue growing throughout this period.
Now, get out there and start saving!
Ray Slater Berry has been working in social media, content marketing, and SEO for a decade. He specializes in the tech, HR, UX design, and product sectors. He is also a published psychological thriller author with his first novel, Golden Boy. Ray is the creative director for his B2B SaaS content agency: DSLX.
