Please help - financial strategy got to save £1M

[RosieLeaLovesTea]

Ok help. Any strategic leaders
who are also fantastic mums
and dads!

I need to write a financial strategy -
public sector- to save £1m
public sector and budgets are stretched!

shit. Please help any ideas and send wine!

Have you tried turning it off and then turning it on again?

Sadly even if a joke, I've seen the waste. Basics would be turn off lights etc., no out of office training, no unnecessary travel and use virtual meetings, don't order stationery, monitor attendance / sickness, audit each and every role, 360 degree reports on management, cut virtual systems and deal with calls and issues as they occur, so delegate responsibility, cut pension contributions and benchmark salaries, look for redundancies in processes and staff.... I worked for an international company that paid and treated us brilliantly, but made it clear we worked cleanly and meanly elsewhere. Great place to work and ethos.

Check all the IT licences for the organisation. Are they all used or necessary? Eliminate your diversity staff. (Soz, but they really aren't essential as long as your employment processes are legal).

Outsource your entire function to Capita.

This sounds like a management exercise rather than a real situation. I find it hard to believe that someone with the responsibility of writing a financial plan to cut £1m from a public sector budget wouldn't have a range of strategies for doing it.

We got really crappy grade paper for the photocopiers, a ban on printing in colour on fear of death, and we lost the coffee pods.

No one has their own office except the HR manager (not even the CEO). We hot desk and are allowed to WFH (but not all the time). We have 3 soundproof booths for confidential phone calls or online meetings and a couple of small gathering zones for in person meetings.

I’ve worked in the public sector for well over a decade and never worked somewhere that isn’t trying to make savings.

The obvious ones are reducing headcount through voluntary redundancy and attrition, removing all bar one printer and giving printing privileges to one trusted person per team, adding additional scrutiny for spend over £50/£100 and all expenses (double sign off normally), switching to digital first to reduce mailing costs, stopping funding professional registration fees or any training, no stationery or extras like branded clothing/uniforms, make any luxuries like staff awards cost neutral through sponsorship, etc. I’ve never worked anywhere that supplies refreshments or catering but I’ve heard those places exist and that would be an easy win.

It’s likely you don’t have many of those options left in the public sector so whatever you chose will feel pretty miserable, impacting on productivity. You just have to get on with it and deliver the best service you can with what’s left for the public you serve.

What's your minimum service level?

What do you need to achieve that?

As a general tip, whatever that level is, you do not need to bring in yet another senior manager in order to deal with this. But you will have some very experienced people women working there already who are an untapped resource and could quite feasibly appreciate the opportunity for a promotion and have never been given the opportunity before - always cheaper than bringing in a failed manager from outside .

It's also never ordering the nuts and bolts staff women to clean the offices and empty the bins, policing the biro budget, buying shit paper that chews up in the photocopier meaning they end up printing everything 3 times and necessitating expensive repair callouts for the bits that are stuck inside the gubbins - or refusing somebody on £26K progression 'because there's no money/that skill you have we might need but it's not on the job description so we aren't going to pay for it' and then bringing in yet another member of manangement.

Are you going to share your wages for help here?!