When money gets tight, layoffs are usually the first move. But a cheaper fix is often already sitting with the people who do the work. Here's how to find it before you decide.
Most headcount decisions get made without one key piece of information: the problems your own people already know about, and the fixes they already have in mind.
When money gets tight, cutting people is the fastest way to move the number, so it's usually the first lever a leader reaches for. The catch is that it often happens before anyone checks whether a cheaper fix was sitting right there the whole time.
Terri and I have spent almost three decades in these meetings, and we've witnessed how sometimes a problem that had been wasting money for months finally comes up, right after the layoff decision is already locked in. The reaction in the room is almost always the same:
"If we'd known about that problem, it might have changed the math."
So why does a problem that's draining money stay invisible until it's too late? It usually comes down to one thing: In most companies, there's no simple path for something a worker notices on the floor to reach the person who could actually fix it.
Picture how it goes. Someone doing the work spots the problem clearly, and she might even know how to solve it. But the person who could act on it sits three levels above her, and she has no easy way to get it up there. So the problem just stays where it is.
This happens more than you'd think. Right now, somewhere in your company, people can already see problems that you can't:
Your regional branch manager knows exactly which compliance step is making her team spend four hours every week retyping information that already lives in another system.
Your call center supervisor knows why calls started running long three months ago and never sped back up, and she knows it has nothing to do with the training leadership just paid for.
Your billing coordinator knows about the verification step that holds up patient intake every single morning, and she already has a simple fix that nobody has asked her for.
So the knowledge you need is already inside your company. The only thing missing is a way to go and get it.
The good part is that getting it is simpler than it sounds. Before you finalize any layoff, go ask your people what's slowing them down.
Ask the people who actually do the work: your shift supervisors, your warehouse leads, your customer service teams, across every location and every shift.
Keep the question specific so you get the real, everyday snags, like a screen that makes someone enter the same order twice, or a step that holds up every shift. Plenty of those problems turn out to have easy fixes, and a few of those fixes will save you real money.
There's a line about all this that has stuck with me for years.
"If only HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more productive."
Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard
What he meant was pretty simple. A big company is usually sitting on a huge amount of useful knowledge, and almost all of it lives in its people's heads, where leadership never sees it. If you could actually get to that knowledge, he figured HP could be three times more productive.
We've watched him be right about this for almost three decades. It costs you very little to find out whether he's right about your company too.
Meet Tell Jules
Tell Jules is the mechanism your operation has been missing: a way to carry the specific problems and ideas your people already have up to the person with the authority to act on them.
It has a roughly 7-minute conversation with the people closest to the work, by phone or a link, at their convenience, in virtually any language, then hands you a sortable report of what surfaced: the specific problem or idea, the fix that employee would make, who to involve, and the questions worth asking before you act.
You finally see what your own people already know, the costly problems they know how to fix and the ideas that could bring in new revenue, and you decide what happens next.
Who it's for
Operations leaders far enough from the floor that they can't personally see what their people see: many sites, many shifts, and layers of management between the work and the decision.
What it's for
Surfacing the specific problems your people run into, the fixes they already have in mind, and the standalone ideas that never make the trip up through the layers on their own.
How it's different
Consultants and top-down initiatives study a sample from the top and hand back a version of what leadership already sees.
Tell Jules reaches every person you invite and returns the exact problem or idea and the fix, in their words, in a fraction of the time.
What setup looks like
You send a list of names and share a link or number with your team.
There's no software to install, no logins to hand out, and no IT project to stand up first.