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> However budgeting in just about any organization I've been involved in doesn't work like that. You ask for $10,000 and there's no budget for it. Even if there

> However budgeting in just about any organization I've been involved in doesn't work like that. You ask for $10,000 and there's no budget for it. Even if there is, there's no guarantee that next year you're not going to have to "tighten belts" and "sharpen pencils". So.. a bigger question. Why doesn't budgeting work like this?

curryst 6y ago
The time savings is theoretical. If the employees that you saved time from are hourly, you can just cut some hours and probably save money. Although you have to offset that with reduced morale if you cut employees/hours. If you're saving time for salaried employees, you probably can't just cut hours. Now you have 1,000 spare man-hours this year, what do you do with them? If you saved 1000 employees the same amount of time per day, each of them has an extra 13.7 seconds per work day. A basically useless amount of time. If you freed up that time from only 100 employees, each gets an extra 20 minutes a day, which is an actually useful amount of time, almost 2 extra hours a week. Assuming that you have saved a significant enough amount of time per employee, then the question becomes do you actually have productive work for them to do? You only saved money if you were going to hire people that you no longer have to hire, if those employees can create something with that spare time that generates revenue, or if you saved enough time that you can fire employee/s. It's the same concept as discounts. Yes, discounts can save you money, but only if it was something you were going to buy anyways. It's like buying a new phone because it's 20% off. If your old phone was on it's last leg or you were going to buy one anyways, you saved 20%, yay. If you have a brand new flagship phone and you buy a new one just because it's 20% off, you haven't actually saved anything.

curryst 6y ago

The time savings is theoretical. If the employees that you saved time from are hourly, you can just cut some hours and probably save money. Although you have to offset that with reduced morale if you cut employees/hours. If you're saving time for salaried employees, you probably can't just cut hours. Now you have 1,000 spare man-hours this year, what do you do with them? If you saved 1000 employees the same amount of time per day, each of them has an extra 13.7 seconds per work day. A basically useless amount of time. If you freed up that time from only 100 employees, each gets an extra 20 minutes a day, which is an actually useful amount of time, almost 2 extra hours a week. Assuming that you have saved a significant enough amount of time per employee, then the question becomes do you actually have productive work for them to do? You only saved money if you were going to hire people that you no longer have to hire, if those employees can create something with that spare time that generates revenue, or if you saved enough time that you can fire employee/s. It's the same concept as discounts. Yes, discounts can save you money, but only if it was something you were going to buy anyways. It's like buying a new phone because it's 20% off. If your old phone was on it's last leg or you were going to buy one anyways, you saved 20%, yay. If you have a brand new flagship phone and you buy a new one just because it's 20% off, you haven't actually saved anything.