According to Liam Byrne, when he and his colleagues left government there was no money left. All gone. Over the coming weeks I’m sure we will find out how the Government is going to re-fill its jam jars and piggy banks. And I’m sure it will impact on us as individuals and within our workplaces. Lots of us will be looking to cut costs. Here are a couple of ideas that may assist you in saving money at work (or ‘generating efficiency savings’ if you work in Finance).
If you are a CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) member, do you ever use the Communities Forum? If you’re not a CIPD member and don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s an area on the CIPD website where you can pose questions or ‘discuss’ issues with other CIPD members. I suppose it’s like the ‘moneysavingexpert.com’ forums, but for HR matters. There are some fantastic discussions (or ‘threads’ as they are correctly called) and they generate so many different ideas – and it’s all free. Well, free if you have paid your annual subscriptions.
I know that lots of non-CIPD members would also find that facility very useful – and that the majority of delegates I have trained are not CIPD members. So if you’ve got a development type question, post it on the blog or send it to me in an email, and we’ll see if people can contribute suggested ideas or actions, and get some discussion going – and here it really will be free!
The theme of sharing is one that I want to have running throughout this blog, and so (in addition to my thoughts) I will also be sharing material that I create and which may be of value to others. Sticking with the cost saving theme, my first practical offering is a Learning and Development Costing Model.
About 10 years ago, I was looking for something that would help me quickly and accurately calculate how much it would cost to train a group of people. I wanted this for when I was in meetings and other senior managers were deciding on a whim to suggest giving 3,000 people one day’s training – with no thought for the cost. I particularly wanted the ‘lost opportunity cost’ including – in other words, the cost to the organisation of the delegate not undertaking their usual work whilst undertaking the training. I couldn’t find anything, so I created my own. I know that a few other training managers now use it, and they find it useful, so others might too. And I have now added comments to explain how to use it.
I wish I could attach it here, but my WordPress learning for today has been that you can’t uplaod MS Excel! – ansd it’s in Excel so that it does all the calculations for you. However, if you would like a copy, please drop me an email or reply here and I’ll gladly pass it on.
What other free resources would you find useful?
Paul
Tags: costing model, forum