Effective Delegation to Reduce Business Expenses

All managers must delegate certain duties to their employees. However, if you don't use effective delegation it will cost your business money. Cut costs and run a more efficient business by learning effective delegation methods.

The Cost Savings of Effective Delegation

Take a look at the hourly wage your employees are earning. Almost every business has an administrative assistant. For this example, the administrative assistant will earn $15 per hour.

You need to schedule a meeting, so you ask your administrative assistant to call the client and set up the meeting. She makes the call and schedules your meeting.

This is not effective delegation. Break down the numbers to see the company actually paid for this task twice. The business paid for both the time it took you to ask the administrative assistant to schedule the meeting and the time it took her to actually do it.

If it takes her 30 minutes to accomplish this task, the business is out $7.50. That doesn't seem like much, but if you have a meeting once a week that is an unnecessary annual expense of $390. Effective delegation could have saved your business this expense.

Instead of having your employee schedule the meeting, why not schedule it yourself? The Golden Rule of effective delegation is this: If a task takes longer to request than do, that is not effective delegation.

Examples of Effective Delegation

If you have an employee that is more skilled than you are in an area, you can use effective delegation to cut expenses. Perhaps you need to see an analysis in spreadsheet form, but you aren't skilled at working with spreadsheets.

If it takes you 4 hours to complete the spreadsheet at $25 per hour, the cost to the business is $100. If your spreadsheet whiz employee can complete it in 3 hours at $16 per hour, the cost to the business is only $48. That is a savings of over 50%.

Effective delegation takes advantage of your employees' skills to fill in the gaps of your own skill set. This is the true spirit of delegation. Discover the skills your employees have and use those skills to your advantage.

Effective delegation isn't about handing off unappealing tasks. Effective delegation is about bringing together a group of employees to work in harmony with one another and increase value to the business. Use effective delegation to save both time and money.