Skills and Entrepreneurship 47
Service doesn ' t increase costs – it eliminates them
by Anastasia Vladychynska
Every cost-cutting programme seems to begin with the same question: where can we reduce headcount?
It’ s understandable. Payroll is visible. It sits neatly on a spreadsheet. Reducing it produces an immediate financial result. Yet what isn’ t visible is the cost of unnecessary work.
After working with organisations across banking, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and professional services, I’ ve become convinced that most businesses don’ t have too many employees. They have too much friction.
People spend their days chasing unnecessary approvals, correcting avoidable mistakes, attending meetings that compensate for broken processes and apologising to customers for decisions they had no part in making.
Then leadership concludes the organisation is inefficient. It isn’ t. It has become difficult to work in.
We keep measuring the wrong thing
Most organisations measure productivity but few measure friction.
We are used to thinking about friction in terms of inconvenience for a client and many businesses are already focused on that. This is great news, because if you want your clients to buy from you and return, you need to make sure their experience with you is two things: simple and pleasant.
Simple means easy to deal with. Pleasant means the emotional side. The two are interconnected, with a long discussion about which comes first.
Yet friction is everywhere inside the organisation as well. A salesperson waits three days for approval. Finance requests information that already exists. Operations correct an error created upstream. Lawyers take 30 days to push a contract back and forth between themselves, a manager and a client while
the company is still waiting to be paid.
Individually, these incidents seem insignificant. Collectively, they consume thousands of working hours.
Ironically, the response is often another efficiency programme focused on reducing the very people compensating for inefficient systems. If you lay off the people and leave the friction, you are only adding costs.
An efficiency system without serviceability is designed to fail
We have seen it in organisations globally: a company invests in a good efficiency-improvement system but employees don’ t adopt it. So the company rolls out adoption programmes and motivation initiatives but the systems still don’ t work and people leave.
Service has acquired the wrong reputation. Mention it in an executive meeting and the conversation quickly turns to cost: more training, more people, more investment – as though service is the cherry on top of the cake when actually it is the recipe for baking the cake in the first place.
I use the word serviceability rather than simply‘ service’.
Serviceability is the organisational capacity to recognise another human being before making a decision that affects them. It means stepping beyond your department, objectives or metrics and asking: Will this make somebody else’ s work easier or harder? When that recognition is absent, friction appears. When it is present, unnecessary work disappears.
Serviceability is what makes a company more efficient. Moreover, it brings innovation to life as employees discuss daily how they can make their internal client’ s work easier.
Every department has a client
Efficient organisations understand that departments are service providers to one another. By‘ understand’, I don’ t mean in a CEO memo. I mean rethinking daily the service they provide to their internal customer. That is a certain mindset. IT serves Operations. Finance serves Commercial. HR serves managers. Procurement serves Manufacturing. Leadership serves everyone.
The question changes from“ Did my department complete its task?” to“ Did my work make the next person’ s job easier?” That small shift changes behaviour. People remove obstacles before they become problems. Departments stop optimising their own performance at everyone else’ s expense.
Efficiency becomes the natural outcome, not a management speech.
Technology cannot solve what leadership continues to create
AI will automate countless tasks and make organisations faster, but speed amplifies whatever already exists. A well-designed organisation with a strong serviceability culture becomes better. A poorly designed organisation simply creates friction faster.
Technology cannot compensate for leaders designing systems without considering the people expected to use them. So perhaps the question isn’ t“ How can we reduce costs?” Perhaps it is:“ Why are intelligent people spending so much of their day overcoming problems that should never have existed?” Also:“ Have we given intelligent people enough autonomy to solve the issues they see happening every day?”
Serviceability is not an act of kindness. It is one of the most commercially intelligent capabilities an organisation can develop.
This is because service doesn’ t increase costs. If done right, it eliminates them.
Anastasia Vladychynska is the founder of Vladychynska Consulting
www. vladychynska. com / en