Managing a restaurant is no easy task. You have to take care of your customers, ensure food and service quality, and handle employees with different schedules, needs, and preferences. Most restaurant managers agree that administrative tasks can be just as grueling as waiting tables all day.
If you're tired of creating schedules for your staff only to receive complaints and have to redo them throughout the month, keep reading. In this article, we'll try to answer whether automating your employee scheduling could improve your restaurant business. You'll also learn about employee scheduling software for restaurants and whether it could benefit your business.
Are you dealing with these workforce scheduling problems?
On the surface, running a restaurant business might seem like a dream. You get to experience different cuisines, discover new dishes and cooking techniques, and work with interesting people. However, running a restaurant is like running any other business. In the end, you spend most of your time dealing with administrative and management tasks.
If you answer "yes" to at least 3 of the questions below, consider automating your scheduling processes.
Do you struggle to schedule employees based on customer demand?
You might choose to always schedule the same number of employees or try to predict the changes in customer traffic. But without proper tools, most restaurant managers either end up with too many employees with nothing to do or too few to handle all the customers and their needs.
Scheduling too few staff members causes burnout and overwork, leading to workplace dissatisfaction.
On the other hand, when workers come to work only to serve a handful of tables throughout the entire day, you lose money as you have to pay their salaries without earning money from the customer flow.
After a while, you can predict the biggest peak days and hours, but scheduling based on this information without a clear system can still be challenging.
Do you employ many workers who have other responsibilities?
One thing many restaurant businesses have in common is employing many part-time employees. Many of them study or have other responsibilities. This means, as a manager, you have to be attentive to their working preferences and make sure you have enough workers to cover each shift.
But what happens when the end of the year comes and most of your staff members have exams and can't come to work? Predicting and preparing for this with only pen and paper can be impossible.
Do you deal with too many unregistered shift swaps?
A story as old as time: an employee tells a coworker that they can’t come to work or asks someone to cover their shift, but the information never reaches the manager. Now you're left with a shift and no one to work.
Most restaurants still rely on hanging paper schedules in the break room to share monthly schedules and shift changes. What happens is that people need to change their schedules throughout the month, but most of them go unregistered, causing staff shortages and poor customer service.
Do you believe you’re wasting money due to poor scheduling?
Most restaurants lose money due to poor staff scheduling in a few ways:
Does your staff often miss shifts or arrive late?
Missed shifts, latecomers, and last-minute shift coverage are still common problems in the restaurant industry. If you don't have enough employees to cover shifts, other workers suffer, along with customer satisfaction.
Last-minute shift coverage can also increase costs for your business, as in many countries, you need to pay double for employees who have to come in on short notice to cover someone else’s shift.
What is automated employee scheduling software?
Automated employee scheduling software is a digital tool with which you can manage and schedule your staff. Software like OPTAS and similar tools offer full scheduling process automation. They also give you a unified digital environment to create schedules, track employee attendance and shift types, and perform relevant calculations within the system. So, if the problems mentioned above are familiar to you, you might want to check out employee scheduling software for restaurants.
What does employee scheduling software for restaurants offer?
Most of the scheduling processes take time. From gathering employee preferences and making schedules to calculating worked hours, breaks, and different shifts – it can take an extra few days per month to get everything done. Employee scheduling software for restaurants speeds up all scheduling tasks through automation.
While you still need to input some data for the program to accurately generate schedules and fill shifts, it completes the tasks in minutes instead of days.
Scheduling software eliminates the risk of human errors, such as double-booking or overlooking employee preferences. It also performs accurate calculations at the end of each accounting period.
Think of the times when you have to calculate the banked hours of all your staff members. The automated tool crunches these numbers in seconds and can automatically export data to other programs like your payroll software.
A connected system, like employee scheduling software for restaurants, can help you create clear workflows for most of your administrative processes. It allows you to track employee attendance and input staff schedule preferences. You can also register their vacations, days off, sick leave, and other information. Such software tracks planned vs. worked hours and so that your accounting department could calculate salaries based on different shift types and employment agreements.
You can then transfer all this information to your payroll, HR, and workforce management systems. Since every manager can access and use the system, you can unify their workflows, making everything clearer and easier for everyone.
As mentioned earlier, the unpredictability of staffing needs can often hurt a business and its reputation. And while you can prepare for busier shifts on weekends, there are more subtle demand fluctuations.
December and the entire Christmas season, for example, is often one of the busiest times for restaurants. As this season approaches, you may realize that half of your workforce has requested vacations, has exams, or has family responsibilities, and you're left with a staff shortage.
A digital system lets you see employee preferences throughout the entire year and manage them in advance. If you notice that everyone is taking vacation at the same time, you can better prepare. You can ask employees in advance to change their vacation dates or schedule fewer people in the months leading up to the peak season to have more accrued hours left.
Labor laws can be tricky. Not only do you need to fairly compensate for overtime and respect employees' time off, but you also must make sure every schedule is followed to the minute. In some countries, employees have to take a 30-minute break every 5 hours. If an employee works a 12-hour shift, they should get at least two 30-minute breaks. You can’t give a single 1-hour break.
Tracking all these intricacies manually often results in poor labor law compliance and inaccurate timesheets. An automated scheduler tracks all this information and informs you when the schedule you're making has compliance issues or automatically generates error-free schedules.
Scheduling tools like OPTAS also offer a TimeClock feature to track employee attendance. In the app, employees can record their arrival time and do the same before leaving work.
It allows you to better evaluate your staffing situation and make sure no one is abusing the company's time. After all, if someone always comes 5 minutes late and leaves 10 minutes early, by the end of the accounting period, it can accumulate into hours of paid but unworked time.
Scheduling software provides various reports and analytics to help you identify workforce trends, monitor labor costs, and make strategic decisions to optimize staffing levels and control expenses.
With this software, you can access data based on selected employees, dates, and locations to get a clear view of your business. The reporting and analytics feature lets you assess employee attendance to identify those who may be slacking off and those who might be working overtime.
Schedule your restaurant staff in minutes with OPTAS
OPTAS is employee scheduling software for restaurants. We've created a universal solution designed for companies with mid-sized and large teams who work on a rotating shift model. After collaborating with many restaurants, we realized how difficult it is to manage teams when everyone works on different schedules, maybe even at different restaurants.
Our software unifies all your scheduling processes, teams, and establishments into one system. With automated staff scheduling software like OPTAS, you can have clarity on how your staff is doing, their preferences, worked time, time off, and attendance to make better staffing and scheduling decisions.
Learn more about the OPTAS solution for restaurants
How does an automated scheduler work in practice?
Whether you're a local B&B business or a growing restaurant chain, automating your employee scheduling can be a real game-changer. One great example of how automation can improve a restaurant business is our client, Courtyard by Marriott, a hotel with a busy restaurant. They were struggling with a lack of structure and too much manual work.
Their CFO contacted us to help reduce manual work. Like most restaurants, their administrative processes were done manually, relying on word-of-mouth communication. Creating schedules took a significant amount of time, and they used to spend hours preparing and managing timesheets.
We worked together to create clear workflows and implement automation, integrating their payroll systems with OPTAS so that every process within the company could be streamlined.
After just a few months of working together, Courtyard by Marriott reduced their schedule and timesheet management time from hours to 30 minutes. They could easily delegate tasks as everything was clear and straightforward. We also integrated employee schedules with their payroll system to speed up information exchange, avoid manual work, and minimize mistakes.
Do you need employee scheduling software for your restaurant?
After reading this article, we hope you have a better idea of whether employee scheduling software for restaurants is the right choice for you. If you’re dealing with issues like manual scheduling, lengthy processes, employee complaints, labor law compliance, and human errors, dedicated scheduling software could help improve your situation.
If you’re still unsure about it, we offer a quick discovery call to help you figure out whether you need a tool like OPTAS. Don't hesitate to book a call with us to make an informed decision!
