Are you tired of using pen and paper or traditional spreadsheets to create your restaurant schedule? If yes, you’ve found your way to the right place.
Managing a restaurant isn’t easy. That’s why you should let tech do the heavy lifting when it comes to restaurant employee scheduling. Instead of spending late-nights, week-in and week-out building schedules, build your schedule in a few clicks with restaurant scheduling software.
Restaurant managers and employees can use their iOS and Android devices to make and share availability changes, shift swaps, and simplify team communication all from one place, wherever they are.
Consider the potential for scheduling and communication chaos in this common scenario:
*Your server, Lindsay, is scheduled to work a shift on Saturday afternoon, but she texts Jane, another server, to take her shift. *
By accident, Lindsay tells Jane the wrong time, and Jane shows up late for the shift. Your manager, Mike, has no idea that this shift trade has occurred behind the scenes, and he’s also about to realize that Jane’s never worked a patio shift before.
Now, consider how a centralized space for scheduling and communicating could have prevented a tough day for Jane, Lindsay, and Mike. Not to mention the customers affected by a busy day on an understaffed patio!
Managing a Restaurant Using Scheduling Software
To turn scheduling into the most effective, efficient—and dare we say easy?—portion of your to-do list, consider the support that restaurant scheduling software could lend.
Here are five major benefits of using 7shifts restaurant scheduling software:
1. Improved Communication Between Staff
81% of workers would rather join a company that values open communication over one with a laundry list of fun perks or benefits.
A study at the McKinsey Global Institute revealed that productivity improves by more than 20% when employees feel connected through regular communication with coworkers and management. When managers fail to foster a workplace culture that values communication, they risk losing staff—62% of employees who leave a workplace do so because of a lack of communication.
Luckily, streamlined restaurant communication is a huge part of what 7shifts brings to the table. Our in-app chat environment creates a work-specific space for employee group chats and one-on-one conversations, and our announcement feature helps management keep the entire team in the loop. We also offer a cloud-based Manger Log Book that keeps the entire management team connected with easy access to daily notes, important shift details, and tasks to follow up on.
2. Increased Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is more than simply having happy or satisfied employees. It goes deeper than that—a fully engaged employee is one who is personally and professionally invested in their work and company to the point that they’ll willingly and enthusiastically go above and beyond the call of duty. Put simply, engaged employees actually look forward to coming to work.
7shifts helps reduce manager workload and increase employee engagement by putting employees in the driver’s seat—when managers publish a schedule with open shifts, their staff has the opportunity to ‘bid’ on the times they’d like to work.
Furthermore, availability updates, time-off requests, and shift swaps can all be handled within the app, so employees can manage their work-life balance right from the comfort of their mobile device, wherever they may be.
When employees feel that their time, needs, and work preferences are respected, you’ll quickly have team of engaged employees eager to clock in and contribute discretionary effort in the name of your restaurant’s success.
3. Boosted Retention Rates
Smart scheduling promotes empowerment and loyalty. With up-to-date scheduling information, you’ll be scheduling proactively and avoiding the reactive practice of “just-in-time” scheduling (which gives employees little or no notice of what their work schedule will be like).
When employees regularly submit their time-off requests and availability updates via the 7shifts app, the information arrives to you in an efficient, uniform fashion, which ensures that the foundation of your schedule ready when you are. (And, hopefully, you’re ready to get that schedule out with plenty of notice!)
7shifts also helps managers schedule without the guesswork. Forecasted sales data is essential for successful scheduling. By working with forecasts and actual sales and labor data pulled from your integrated POS system, you’ll always be scheduling for proper staff coverage and not bringing in employees when they’re not needed or not available, which goes a long way towards retaining your trained, seasoned workforce.
4. Increased Savings
Time is money, and when it comes to restaurant scheduling, the cliché is at its most literal. With every shift you add to your schedule, you impact your labor budget.
Labor costs account for a full third of a restaurant’s operating costs, so efficient, smart scheduling is one of the most cost-effective actions you can take to save your restaurant money.
When your schedule is supported by forecasts based on actual sales data drawn from your POS system to your 7shifts Dashboards, you’ll see labor costs decrease by as much as 3%! Efficient staff scheduling is the quickest way to start reducing your labor costs, which is a huge driver for profitability.
5. More Time
As the manager or owner of a busy restaurant, your time is always at a premium, so it’s imperative that you make the most of every minute.
A Forbes article on entrepreneurs and time management highlighted the value of being clear with yourself on how much time to allot to certain tasks. Restaurant managers spend upwards of 4 hours per week scheduling staff using traditional pen-and-paper methods.
Restaurateurs that use 7shifts spend 80% less time scheduling their staff. What would you do if you could reduce the time you spent scheduling, and re-distribute it somewhere else? Would you spend more time on the floor with your staff? Would you be more actively recruiting new team members or coaching existing team members?
The possibilities are endless, but the bottom line is that every second saved on tasks that can be automated is a second you can use elsewhere.
If your back-office desk is an ever-growing mountain of cocktail-napkin notes, post-its, binders, and endless print-outs destined to be marked up by Sharpies, technology is here to save the day.
Plus, when you migrate to a restaurant scheduling software solution, you’ll spend less time in that back office, and more time on the floor with your team!
Interested in learning more about how scheduling software can kick-start your scheduling game? Get your free copy of the 7shifts eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Restaurant Scheduling.
