Fewer people, same demand? How to keep work moving after staff cuts

When teams become smaller, continuing with the same processes and expectations can quickly lead to backlogs, stress and burnout.

The organisations that respond more successfully do not begin by asking, “How can we make fewer people do the same amount of work? ”They ask: “𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘀𝗼 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝘃𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗻 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁?”

That shift, from pushing people harder to improving the system, is what allows services to keep moving, customers to continue receiving value and teams to work in a more sustainable way.

Want to know how to do this properly, then read on...

Start by recognising the impact

Restructures and redundancies are difficult for everyone involved. The colleagues who remain may be dealing with uncertainty, the loss of valued team members and anxiety about their own workloads and futures.

This is not the moment to arrive with a stopwatch and demand greater productivity, and for the love of humanity, don't commission outside consultants to do it either. You will spark panic and stress.

Just be honest about the situation, listen to staff and acknowledge that the previous way of working may no longer be possible. Process improvement should be positioned as a way to remove frustration and protect people’s capacity, not as another cost-cutting exercise.

Frontline staff must be closely involved. They understand where work gets stuck, where effort is duplicated and which policies or systems create unnecessary activity. Their involvement also helps ensure that any redesigned process is practical, understood and owned by the people expected to operate it.

Don’t spread reduced capacity across everything

After staff cuts, organisations commonly try to preserve every service, task and internal requirement. The result is that limited capacity is spread too thinly and nothing works particularly well.

Instead, return to purpose. What must your service deliver for its customers and stakeholders? Which activities directly support that purpose? Which requirements are essential, and which have simply accumulated over time?

This is an opportunity to make conscious choices about what the organisation will: continue to do, do differently, stop doing, temporarily pause, or do less frequently.

Protecting customer value does not mean protecting every historic task. Reports nobody reads, duplicated checks, unnecessary approvals and meetings without a clear purpose all consume capacity that may now be needed elsewhere.

Understand demand and capacity properly

Job titles and staff numbers tell you very little about whether a team has enough capacity. You need to understand the work.

Start by understanding demand: What demand do you receive, from where (or what is the trigger for it), and is it avoidable (failure demand)

Then capacity: How long do tasks and processes take to complete, how does the work get distributed between team members/roles.

Understanding failure demand is especially important here. Poor communication, errors, missed appointments and unresolved enquiries frequently generate more calls, emails, complaints and rework. This additional work is created because something was not done, or not done correctly, the first time. Removing the cause of that demand can release capacity while improving the customer experience. It is considerably more sustainable than expecting a reduced team to process an ever-growing volume of avoidable work.

Access all our resources for measuring and managing demand and capacity here: https://www.ad-esse.com/balancing-demand-and-capacity

Still with me? Okay, this is probably the bit you were waiting for:

Review the end-to-end process

When resources are tight, organisations sometimes make small changes within individual teams. But local improvements can simply move a problem from one part of the service to another.

Map out the work from the customer’s initial request through to the final outcome. Look at the process as it is really delivered, not how a procedure says it should be delivered. We use a tool called Value Stream Mapping to do this, and it's done with representatives from across the Value Stream. Check out resources for Value Stream Mapping here: https://www.ad-esse.com/value-stream-mapping

Pay attention to: backlogs, where people complete tasks in different ways (variation), handovers, delays, batching, checking and authorisations (basically any of the 7-wastes!).

For every activity, ask: why do we do this at all? Does it add value for the customer, help meet a genuine requirement or enable another essential step?

Only once unnecessary work has been removed should you consider how technology or automation might support the redesigned process. Otherwise, there is a real risk of hard-coding waste into a new system.

Make priorities and performance visible

After staff cuts, teams need absolute clarity about where to focus their reduced capacity. Leaders must decide what matters most and communicate it consistently.

This means being explicit about:

• The outcomes the team is to deliver

• What customers, services and activities take priority

• What they can stop, pause or do less of

• What they need to start doing or do more of

• What takes priority when demand outstrips capacity.

Without this clarity, people will make their own decisions about what to prioritise. They may continue completing familiar tasks that no longer add enough value, try to maintain unrealistic service levels or treat every request as equally urgent. The result is conflicting priorities, overwork and important activity being crowded out.

Leaders must also define what good performance looks like. This should be expressed in terms of the outcomes the service needs to achieve, not simply how busy people appear to be.

Measures and KPIs should help leaders and teams understand whether the process is delivering those outcomes. Measures should be visible, regularly reviewed and used to identify problems and guide improvement. Avoid arbitrary activity targets that encourage staff to complete more individual tasks without improving the overall service. Good measures should show whether the team is focusing its limited capacity on the right work—and whether that work is delivering the intended result. Access our resources for developing effective measures here: https://www.ad-esse.com/measurement-and-data-analysis

Standardise, learn and keep improving

Once a better process has been designed, agree the best-known way of completing it. Make responsibilities, handovers and service standards clear, and ensure people have the skills and information they need.

Standardisation should not prevent improvement. It creates a reliable starting point from which teams can spot abnormalities, solve problems and continue refining the process.

The first redesigned version will rarely be perfect. Demand will change, new constraints will emerge and some solutions will work better than others. Leaders therefore need to give teams permission and support to identify problems and improve their work continuously.

This is an essential step in ensuring that waste does not creep back into the process and you get performance improvement not performance regression.

Make the new structure workable

Reducing headcount changes an organisation’s capacity. It must also prompt an honest review of its priorities, processes and expectations.

By understanding demand, removing unnecessary activity and involving staff in redesigning the work, organisations can protect essential services without placing an unsustainable burden on the people who remain.

The goal is not to squeeze more activity from fewer people. It is to create a simpler, more effective system that enables those people to focus their time and skills where they add the greatest value.

If your organisation is adjusting to reduced capacity, Ad Esse can work with you and your people to help you understand demand, identify where capacity is being lost and redesign your processes around the work that matters most. Email 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼@𝗮𝗱-𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲.𝗰𝗼𝗺 to get started.