I used to do budget forecasting years ago. There are many ways that Canon could have avoided layoffs altogether, by cost saving in other ways. For example:
- Doing what Canon did back in 2009 when they cut salaries I am sure that everyone would have rather the whole company take a 10% pay cut then to cut 20% of the workforce.
- Not having the whole company have access to a supply room for example where you know, people are taking stuff home. Having someone sitting desk outside the supply room and have supply room hours a couple days a week a couple hours those days. Person in charge of Supply room scans Employee ID card and scans the items that is taken. People might hate it, but it will cut down on the vast majority of supplies.
- Not being able to copy or print without putting your employee number in the copy machine will cut down on a lot of useless, copying and printing.
- Firing the security guards. They don’t do anything, anyway. No reason to have them.
- Stop Profit Sharing for all employees. That is 4.5% of salaries right there.
- Stop all extracurriculars. Meaning no more pretzels in the cafeteria, no more taking teams out to lunch for different celebrations, no more chocolate fountains in the cafeteria, no more decorating quarterly meetings with balloons, no more annual meeting at a hotel with food and photo booths and ridiculousness, no more pizza or cakes available in the cafeteria, etc. Cutting this useless spending would have saved jobs.
- No more contests with free giveaways. Also included is no more free stuff; like stupid stuff like paper weights that say how much money Canon is making.
- When is the last time that Canon did research on vendors to see if they can get cheaper coffee, vending machine people, cleaning people, etc.? Maybe there are some vendors where they cannot save money but maybe there are some vendors where they can.
- Canon offers life assurance to employees, that Canon pays for. To save jobs, Canon could have informed Employees That is six months Canon would no longer provide life insurance for free to employees. The employees would have the time to find their own life insurance. Employees may not like it. But jobs would have been saved.
Right there I just came up with nine cost saving ideas that right off the bat that would have save the Canon over 20%. Bam all jobs saved.
And yes, a bunch of people would be annoyed at all of these changes. But that is when upper management has to have some guts and meet with the people in person and say Canon is in bad shape and it’s either make all these changes or lose 20% of the workforce. We really don’t want to do that, so we really have to go this route at least for now until we can weather the the storm. I am sure that the majority of employees would rather that than for 20% of the workforce to be gone. Canon took the lazy route to save money. But that lazy route is going to bite Canon because they will have no one left with any real knowledge.