In today’s competitive market, many restaurants are struggling to simply find (and keep) workers, and pay rates are on the rise like every other cost. All of which makes this the perfect time to optimise the expenditure you do make.
• Be smarter at scheduling
• Make your schedule flexible
• Minimise overtime
• Assess your staffing needs
• Multi-skill your workforce
Make 2023 the year your servers never stand around doing nothing – and never get rushed off their feet at busy times.
Your restaurant POS software provides great tools for making sure your staffing keeps perfectly in step with your requirements. By capturing real-time data, it takes all the guesswork out of labour managment, even providing accurate forecasts of labour needs – you’ll know exactly when you are busiest.
But having said that, we all know the hospitality business can be hard to predict, and you should make sure that your schedule is not a set-it-and-forget-it affair.
Good POS restaurant software builds in flexibility so you can easily amend it to take into account business changes. For instance, are sales unexpectedly trending up or down? Your epos will let you know for sure, and you can adjust staffing accordingly.
Overtime is never a great idea, although sometimes necessary. It means something has come up that you didn’t expect, such as staff sickness or a flow of guests out of the blue.
In addition, staff sometimes welcome overtime as a boost to their pay packet, but it can also cause resentment if over-done – and in these times when talent is scarce, you want your workers to feel happy and confident about their workload.
The lack of readily-available labour has meant some outlets run permanently on overtime, where the few available servers work much longer. And that can really hit your bottom line.
If in the end it becomes necessary to trim opening hours, forecasting reports provided by your restaurant POS software can ease the blow by showing where you can do it to the greatest effect without missing too much business.
In the hurly-burly of daily service, it can be hard to find time to take a fresh look at labour levels. You should be looking at:
• Do you have the right number of full-timers compared to part-timers?
• What positions are they fulfilling?
• How do their responsibilities pan out?
• Do you take on seasonal workers, and how does that work out?
Because a POS restaurant system gives you an end-to-end view of your whole business, even across multiple sites, you base your review on comprehensive reports. It means you can take a fully-informed view of what’s really happening, and whether you are matching labour with real requirements.
You know how hard it can be to hang onto workers – the hospitality industry has a huge turnover of staff.
However, it’s true that investing in staff with training pays off in different ways – you get upskilled workers who can jump on different tasks when needed and provide a great guest experience that promotes customer loyalty. In return, they feel enriched by the training and valued by your organisation.
These are tricky times to find time for training, but POS restaurant software helps. Not only does it make apparent when time can be found, but it also improves operational efficiencies to free servers up. For instance, tableside ordering and payment prevents a lot of pointless running back and forth.
Some of the biggest names in UK hospitality – Dishoom, Gaucho, BrewDog, Doner Shack – are enjoying incredible success and expansion with the help of Aloha restaurant POS software by NFS.
Discover how it’s working for them – and how it can work for you in 2023.
