Staff scheduling… it’s easy, right? How hard can it possibly be to schedule a few staff members for your business? Well, it depends on the business. Staff scheduling is as unique as the person doing it, and blanket features rarely truly meet the needs of a business – and its people. Offering limited features to our customers was never an option, no matter what Erik and Anthony thought in the beginning…
When Erik and I started dreaming about scheduling software years ago, we were busy helping our clients jump through operational hurdles – in many cases, hurdles that a computer could do faster than a human manager. The management team could then spend time with clients and employees; duties a computer could not perform for them.
So, we sketched out the easiest possible scheduling system we could think of accounting for the varied operations at different restaurants. We asked one of our staff members to consider it his daily project to build a proof of concept for a simple scheduling software.
Our dreams were meager: a graphical scheduling system in a modern web browser, sending out emails and text reminders to staff members, making sure that everyone was in the loop.
Craig, one of my best friends (and a roommate in college), worked at a local restaurant (Zookini’s), and his uncle ran the place. Every week, we had to pack up in my truck and drive across town to see what was on the schedule. Every week, Craig paid me a few bucks for the gas we were burning. Every week, I asked him if he knew that he and his uncle were crazy. Surely there was a simple web page waiting for their schedule to be uploaded so that staff knew when to be at work. Craig and I discussed that good restaurant scheduling software would need to get rid of this driving for the employees. It needed to keep staff in the loop!
TimeForge has evolved, and will continue to evolve to encompass the needs of our users. We live and breath our three tenants of software development for our labor management software package:
- Make sure staff members stay in the loop on everything the business does.
- Keep managers happy and on the floor – keep them out of the back office.
- Be flexible, so that the software can change as needed for our customers.
Have you tried TimeForge recently? Sign up for a free trial to see how our amazing software can help run your restaurant, retail, or hospitality business!
Part Two is coming…
