Running a restaurant is notoriously difficult; statistics about how many new restaurants fail within a couple years are grim, and the ones that succeed are often in precarious financial situations. Any edge that can be found against rivals is too important to ignore.
Many restaurants across North America today are using employee scheduling software to streamline operations, to make work for all staff both more efficient and easier. Let’s take a closer look at how it works.
Perfect Schedules, Faster
The primary thing about having an easy to use scheduling app is the major reduction in time taken to create a schedule, up to 80% less time than it would otherwise take. This frees up your staff so they can concentrate more on their primary tasks, like serving or cooking food.
One of the major things weighing down a restaurant’s finances is labor costs: employee scheduling software reduces labor expenses by 1-3%. Not only does this automated schedule maker relieve staff of a frustrating and time-consuming task, it leads to direct savings in an area where restaurants need to keep lean and trim.
Information at Your Fingertips
Knowledge is power in business, and employee scheduling software lets you know everything happening in your restaurant. It does this by giving managers and executives two very different and important kinds of knowledge.
The first is quantifiable data about all the money coming in and out of your business — from the cash register to the tips your employees make, employee scheduling software takes it all into account. Most industry leaders in employee scheduling software are compatible with all the popular POS systems, so the manager-facing dashboard has every economic statistics you can want, as well as custom ones you decide to track and even things like weather.
But employee scheduling software also gives to managers another dimension of the goings on of the restaurant by including first-hand feedback from frontline staff. After each shift, employees are prompted to describe in their own words how they think their shift went.
This enables managers to get insights into the human dimension of the restaurant operations and address issues before they become problems or encourage and reward good habits. From the micro picture of human relations to the macro economic data underlying each restaurant location, employee scheduling software makes it easy to know the entire picture so business decisions are always made from a place of full knowledge.
Efficient Communication
Employee scheduling software allows managers to send one-way messages that can’t be responded to when they need to inform their staff of something, but don’t want needless responses to waste time. It’s also extremely easy to make a chat with one staff member, a particular group, or whatever configuration is needed. This way, everybody remains connected and informed of all the vital information they need, but no time is wasted keeping them in the know.
Serving delicious food isn’t enough for a restaurant to survive such a competitive landscape. New technology like employee scheduling software drives results and makes the job simpler for all staff. You just have to hope your competitors aren’t also using it, so you can get the edge against them.
