Good Essay About The Budget Problem

I also reviewed the cost of paying wages and realized we spent a staggering amount paying our large staff. The scope of this problem was significant; the budget had been missed by three to five thousand francs in each of the previous six months. The shortage of revenue impacted every single member of the workplace, the threat of the business closing loomed heavily over everyone’s heads. In addition, the lack of customers and the high number of employees demotivated the staff. My staff reported that they often felt very bored at work. I also spent a good amount of time each day dealing with conflicts between staff members. I seemed to spend more time dealing with arguments and hurt feelings than providing mentorship and guidance on how to provide great customer service. I realized that having so many employees had resulted in too much down time. The down time led to a lot of interpersonal conflict so the overall environment was highly toxic. I knew we needed to solve these problems with a result of increasing revenue and morale, if things continued the way they were going the turnover rate was going to be overwhelming. I decided upon three potential solutions to present to upper management: increasing marketing, decreasing the number of employees or cutting the price of our services.
Initially I thought increasing marketing would be the best option. While I had taken to heart the feedback from customers about our prices being too high I believed a marketing campaign targeted toward increasing awareness of the high quality of the food and beverages we offered would be effective. This solution aimed at creating commercials, flyers and posters to be distributed around the hotel conveying how much better our food and beverages were in comparison to what could be found in the surrounding areas. This approach would include an upfront cost; we would need to finance the manpower and materials needed to create the marketing. I anticipated that the cost would be approximately one thousand francs. I knew it was important to not rely solely on my opinion so I did some research to determine if this approach would be effective. I created a survey for guests at the hotel to fill out which included questions about the impact the quality of the food and beverage had on their decision making. When I received the surveys back I learned most guests made their decisions based on price, not quality. Clearly, the cost of increasing marketing was not likely to be worth the benefit. I decided to investigate the option of decreasing the number of employees.
When I began searching for solutions for the revenue and morale problems I managed a staff of twenty three team members. The high staff count was due to the large volume of events that needed to be handled with precision. Superior customer service was a top priority and the common belief was having more staff on hand increased the level of customer service. I decided to put this belief to the test, in preparation for the next large volume event I strategized a plan to utilize eight staff members instead of the normal sixteen. I identified the most skilled members of my staff and provided them more responsibility to make up for the reduction in manpower. The event ran very smoothly, it turned out that using fewer staff members who were highly skilled resulted in better customer service than using more staff members who were not as capable. This approach saved money due to the decrease in paid wages, we paid eight francs an hour and the event was four hours of work so by having fewer staff members we saved two hundred and fifty six francs. This fact supported my belief that decreasing the number of employees would be an effective way of increasing profits. That being said, I cared deeply for the people who worked for me so I wanted to see if there was another way to save money that did not include laying staff members off. I decided to investigate the possibility of lowering the price of our services.
The food and beverage team was responsible for a bar and diner as well as room service and catered events. As the feedback I received from guests indicated that a reduction in price may result in more business I decided to see if this approach would be effective. I created a spreadsheet to provide me the ability to manipulate the numbers to help identify if reducing the prices of our services could be a useful solution to our revenue problem. I started by reducing all of our offerings by one franc. As I did the calculations I realized that if we reduced the cost of items by even one franc we would need to increase the number of guests each day by ten to meet our budgetary needs. I knew this increase in number of guests was unlikely even with a reduction in price. After making several attempts at pricing scenarios I came to the conclusion that lowering the price of our services would not be an effective approach to solving our revenue and morale problems.
After careful review of the data I had gathered in support of the three potential solutions to our revenue and morale problems I decided to approach management with a proposition. I presented a plan to reduce the staff from twenty three members to twelve. I provided a breakdown of how I would schedule the necessary staff for the bar and diner as well as for room service and catering events with the lower number of manpower. Part of my presentation included a description of each staff member I recommended keeping. I included examples of their strengths to support my position that a team of twelve strong staff members would provide better customer service than a team of twenty three staff members including eleven whose skills were weak to mediocre. I also included the survey I had provided to guests at the end of the catering event I staffed with eight people to support my claim that customer service levels would be superior with a reduction in staff. The management team chose to support my decision and we reduced the number of staff members.
We monitored the results of the choice by seeing what impact was made to the budget. Laying off the staff resulted in a 55% reduction of cost in wages paid. By reducing the cost of wages paid we were able to meet the monthly budget. In addition, the reduction in the number of employees improved the moral of the remaining staff because there was more work to do, less down time and more responsibility. The team members were more engaged because the work became more fulfilling and interpersonal conflicts were less predominant. This was monitored by the number of conflicts brought to the attention of management. The overall work environment was no longer toxic which resulted in customer service improving. Over the next few months the number of guests buying food and beverages increased due to the improvement in customer service. We not only met our monthly budget expectations, we exceeded them. The problems of not meeting our budgetary needs and low morale among staff members had been solved.