My father was in the retail furniture business, he owned and operated many Ethan Allen stores in the Midwest. He had a lot of business sayings that I overheard. One of my favorites was “stop stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.” I thought of this statement last week when I was watching a printer make all kinds of workarounds so they could pay fractionally less for a software solution. The software solution was charged by the named user, the printer was contorting their entire workflow to “share logins across several users.”

So, I heard my father talking to me (he’s no longer in physical form), “stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.” We tend to discount the time of our full-time employees because we are paying for it already—looking at them like sunk costs. So, when we ask them to do things that are non-value add (aka a complete waste of their time), we don’t see it as a cost. Well, my father would have said it has real costs. The costs are both hard and soft costs. The hard costs are the opportunity costs of having your labor operating efficiently. The soft costs are the impact things like this have on morale. People know when they are being asked to do something that isn’t valuable. People want to contribute in an authentic way. When they do, it’s motivating. When they don’t, it can kill morale.

For the people who work for me, I want to give them the opportunity to be as effective and efficient as possible. They often suggest shortcuts or workarounds to save money and I do appreciate the suggestions. I will not put them at a disadvantage in their toolset to save a few dollars. The math doesn’t work out. Virtually every software tool is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) or going there. This typically means monthly subscriptions that can be seat-based. The value of moving to most of these services is the auditability. Sharing seats kills your ability to audit what each individual user is doing.