Restaurants around the world may serve vastly different kinds of food, but they all have one thing in common: beyond food prep, they need to run a tight business to keep competitive in a notoriously difficult industry. While the explosion of competition from new restaurants and food trucks presents clear challenges for restaurateurs, new technology is there to make their operations easier to run.
Here are four ways that employee scheduling software helps restaurants manage their employees.
Perfect Schedules, Right Away
Creating a work schedule involves sorting out many moving pieces, a frustrating and time-consuming weekly routine. When you manage your staff with scheduling software you can reduce the time schedule creation takes by up to 80%, and also make schedules that respond to every employee’s needs.
This doesn’t only ease an annoying task or get it finished in less time; the schedule it makes is actually much better, too.
Streamlined and Efficient Communication
With employee scheduling software, managers can keep connected with staff remotely, but always in a way which is efficient and practical. For example, they can send “announcements” to staff which relay to them essential information. This feature doesn’t allow them to respond, so as to prevent an unnecessary back and forth that wastes valuable time.
When dialogue is required, there’s a chat function that allows staff to keep connected with colleagues individually, or in teams or groups, as required.
Submit Availability and Request Offs Remotely
Aside from facilitating chats, employee scheduling software allows staff to let their manager know when they can and can’t work remotely, using intuitive drag and drop features right in the app. This way, they don’t need to wait until their next shift to write this information down inside a crowded calendar.
They can also request days off in this way, which the manager can approve of remotely too. This gives employees more agency over their personal lives, and enables the restaurant to confirm its schedule way ahead of time.
Advanced Time-Clock
Staff used to simply punch “in” or “out” of work, but the humble time-clock has undergone a modern transformation in employee scheduling software. Now, you can create custom breaks for employees, so attendance reports give a truer and fuller picture of what staff are doing. For example, they can punch out for a “coffee break,” or for whatever other break your restaurant allows.
It’s no problem if an employee forgets to punch out of a shift; the time-clock will punch them out automatically if they haven’t done so after a set amount of time beyond when their shift was supposed to end. Along the same lines, managers can also prevent staff from signing in too early before a shift.
Running a restaurant has never been easy, but modern tools give you and your team a significant boost. Use employee scheduling software as a means to help keep your staff organized and structured, so they are freer to focus on satisfying customers and creating unforgettable dishes.