Easy Labor Management – 5 Tips to Build Better Employee Schedules
- Employees who ride the clock are draining business profits. Monitor timesheets and schedules to effectively stop early clock ins. Better yet, use a labor management system that does both attendance and employee scheduling – and can enforce the schedule – such as TimeForge
- Fingerprint scanners are delicate pieces of technology. Use them to clock in/out. Don’t use them to enter PINs. Restaurant and hospitality staff normally must enter a PIN / id into a Point of Sale system every few minutes, and with greasy hands, fingerprint scanners become defective quickly
- Not sure where your labor dollars are going? Check your fixed / non-variable (manager) salaries and your variable hours (hourly staff). You may be surprised at what you find as many labor dollars are tied up in non-variable staff members.
- Take time to review the schedule and compare sales and customer throughput to your staffing levels. High ratios can be very costly to your business. A high ratio of labor to sales or customer throughput implies one of three business problems:
- Staff members are spending a lot of time with individual customers, and are not adequately serving customers who may be waiting (who then leave).
- The business is over-staffed, with more employees on site than are necessary.
- Profit per customer / order is too low, and needs to be raised.
Act quickly to identify which problem is occurring, and solve it.
- Make sure only one manager per department is responsible for approving requests. Otherwise, there can be confusion about time off allotments. If one manager approves a time off request for one staff member, and another manager approves a request for another staff member – the likelihood of upset staff, higher turnover, and staff shortages is significantly higher than if one manager is responsible for handling requests. Good communication is key to labor management success.
TimeForge labor management software is used by owners and operators of restaurants, retail stores, bars, grills, and other service-oriented businesses to increase profits, reduce turnover, and improve retention.
