Cutting costs. They just don't get it.

So RBS is cutting costs.  Pretty drastic stuff especially when it comes to staff expenses. Chris Kyle’s internal e-mail spells it out in detail – see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15317024    There are certainly going to be a lot of unhappy staffers around.

Apart from the usual “victims” such as a freeze on hardware and software spending for the remainder of 2011, the other cuts are drastic and wide-ranging such as  cancellation of non-essential information services, an international travel freeze for “internal purposes” (whatever that may mean), no more taxi’s home for late work (which now shifts from 9 pm to 10 pm), no staff entertainment for remainder of year, no new periodical/ newspaper/ magazine subscriptions for remainder of year, no new external training for the rest of 2011 and no further approvals for telecoms expenses like the BlackBerry.

One just wonders about how much of a meaningful saving is going to be achieved by all this. In all probability it is just window dressing to try to make the yearend figures look marginally better. In the process one simply irritates hard working staffers and simply degrade services to customers (not that customers are really important anymore).

What seems to be missing however are cuts to exorbitant salaries and obscene bonuses that some “star” staff enjoy. That is where the real savings are to be made.