At Citi, there go the colour copies and BlackBerrys...
S. Mitra Kalita -
Wednesday, August 27, 2008 1:48 AM
Citibank just told its employees to get a better handle on costs, including measures as saving colour copies for presentations, making double-sided copies more often, restricting mobile expenses to just business calls and limiting the BlackBerrys... Sounds like a lot of what we have been hearing in India, as a recent column and blog post mentioned. Regular readers of my column also know my long and storied relations with Citi and cost-cutting (disclosure: I am an investor) but these moves surprise me because I thought the company was already pretty much down to the bare bone. Indeed, this AP story says: "The moves are yet another step in the bank's attempt to become
profitable again after three straight quarters of losses. Citigroup,
currently the nation's largest bank by assets, has already eliminated
more than 14,000 jobs this year and raised about $40 billion in capital
after losing a cumulative $17.4 billion during the last quarter of 2007
and the first two quarters of this year."
One thought I have is that asking employees to make double-sided copies might backfire because those things require, like, a PhD in logistics. Past efforts to do this at other companies have found workers spend so much time and effort trying to figure out the machine, they often end up losing paper in trial runs but want to show the big bosses that they are saving paper so they still show up to meetings with the two-sided handouts! And BlackBerrys, while I also have spent much wordage and ink cursing mine, can help workers remain attentive to their supervisors' and customers' needs. The personal versus business call thing, I understand in principle, but have you ever tried to separate out the calls and felt like the three hours you spend doing that could have been more efficiently spent on real work??!! In a previous employer, ironically during the go-go-go 2000s where even dogs were starting dot-coms, we had forms where we had to fill in boxes for every personal call we made--even the missed call to Ma! I got so fed up, I just stopped submitting my bills for reimbursement. Hey, wait a second... do you think that's the point of such measures?