Build Superior Staff Schedules

Sometimes, the best way to manage the labor is to look at your existing processes and procedures, look at what you’re doing to make schedules, and manage employees, and see if that’s the best possible way to do things.   Here are some simple labor management tips for you to build a superior staff schedule.   Of course, the best possible solution is to use employee scheduling software for your restaurant or retail business.
Simple Labor Management – 5 Pointers to Build Superior Employee Schedules

1. Staff members who ride the clock are wasting business profits. Babysit timesheets and schedules to efficiently put an end to early clock ins. Better yet, use a labor management system that will schedule the workforce and monitor attendance- and has the capabilities to implement the schedule- such as TimeForge!
2. Fingerprint scanners can be fragile bits of technology. Clock in or clock out with them. Do not use them to insert PINs into your Point of Sale system. Restaurant and hospitality personnel typically must enter a PIN/id into a POS system every few minutes to ring up orders, open / close a table, and perform other tasks. With greasy hands, fingerprint scanners become damaged almost immediately – make sure your equipment is up to the task.
3. Unsure where your labor dollars are going? Review your fixed/non-variable (manager) paychecks and your variable hours (hourly staff). You may be flabbergasted at what you find; many labor dollars are tied up in non-variable staff members.
4. Take time to analyze the schedule and customer throughput and compare sales to your staffing levels. High ratios can be extremely expensive to your business. A high ratio of labor to sales or customer throughput implies at leas one of three business dilemmas:
   1. Workers are spending a bunch of time with one particular customer, and are not sufficiently serving customers who may be waiting (who then disappear).
   2. The business is over-staffed, with more workers present than are called for.
   3. Income per customer/order is poor, and needs to be brought up.

   Act promptly to determine which issue you’re dealing with, and fix it.

5. Be certain that only one manager per department is in charge of approving requests. Any other way, and there can be bewilderment about time off allotments. If one manager authorizes a time off request for one employee, and second manager authorizes a request for another worker – the possibility of discontented staff, costly turnover, and insufficient staffing is considerably higher than if a single manager is in charge of requests. Exceptional communication is essential to labor management prosperity.

TimeForge is a Best of Breed labor management software, which will streamline your operations to offer the most efficient solution in scheduling, human resource management, attendance tracking, turnover reduction, and communications. Sign up for a free trial today to see what TimeForge can do for you!