10 ways to cut costs when creating your Schedule
1. New week, New schedule
Every week is different and your schedule should reflect this. Don’t just recycle last weeks schedule. Ensure you have checked the availability of your staff for the coming week. Check last weeks schedule to see where you may have been overstaffed and look ahead to any large events that may be planned. Don’t leave yourself struggling to cover shifts at the last minute
2. Cost & build
Cost as you build to see where you can save. If you wait until the end then it becomes a mad dash to cut hours and stay on budget, which always leads to inefficient schedules.
3. Set clear targets
Without clear targets there is no way to ensure a steady labor cost. Work out what your current target labor cost is based on this weeks schedule and see if you can reduce it by 5% for next week.
4. Monitor targets
Target sales per labor hour (SPLH) is a great key performance indicator (KPI) to track for your business. If you have target sales of £2000 and target hours of 40 then your SPLH is £50. Try and maintain a steady SPLH throughout the week and don’t let it fluctuate with sales patterns. This will also ensure you have adequate staff cover for each day
5. Arriving together?
Do all your staff arrive at the same time for each scheduled shift? Do you need all your staff to be in at the same time? Most shifts require a bit of prep work which usually only takes one or two people. If you adjust your shifts to start in 15 or 30 minute increments then your staff will arrive as you need them.
6. Are labor patterns reflecting sales?
When your sales increase your labor cost may increase but when sales decrease do your labor costs decrease? In order to achieve a reduction in costs you have to schedule accordingly and anticipate periods of low sales as well as high sales.
7. Be Flexible
Rarely do shift workers have control of their schedules. This can have a huge impact on their lives, making it hard for them to plan outside of work. For part-time workers, hourly workers, the deskless workforce, or people working in the gig economy, this also increases the challenge of working multiple jobs and calculating their income, as their hours can fluctuate wildly.
8. KPI’s
Help your managers to perform better and achieve your organization's standards using a wide range of configurable KPIs embedded with the schedule. Assess and analyze each location against the same set of KPIs or define location-specific measurables.
9. Overtime
With wages on the rise, it can be a struggle to keep labor costs under control. One way you can offset the impact of rising wages is by controlling overtime. Other than last-scheduling needs, it’s difficult to justify spending an additional 50% for work that could have been handled more affordably. Set realistic overtime goals with your team. While it might be unreasonable to shoot for no overtime, a 25% reduction might be more doable. Help your team reach these goals by showing them alternative solutions to using overtime that will save you money. A lot of restaurant back-office systems offer an “approaching overtime report” which can help you control hours and avoid overtime.
10. Outside business hours
If your employees are working outside of business hours, you’re losing money. To minimize your loss, schedule as few people as possible for prep and closing shifts. Then, aim to have employees complete most no service tasks while you’re open for business and generating revenue.
Optimizing Your Schedule
Optimization plays a crucial part in any business and smart scheduling gives you the power to choose how to optimize your business. So, what does optimization look like?
The right data, the right people, the right tools
Optimizing labor costs is best managed from the top down with an investment in technology that enables operators. When companies invest in the right technology to measure incoming data, success will follow when used right. Best practices can be more easily shared across multiple locations when there is a deeper insight into data available. If one location consistently reaches and manages labor targets whilst other locations underperform that can be leveraged
Full visibility and ownership to Employees
Having engaged and empowered staff who strive to perform; achieving goals and objectives are an advance for any hospitality brand. Expressing a strong connection between performance and results as expressed in the data is vital to meeting that goal. It enhances the value of labor against its rising costs, which is an important facet of ROI.
Most people want to do their best at whatever they do from location managers to waiting staff. Regularly showing staff where they can improve and who is doing the best job based on real business data is an important means to extending a sense of connection and ownership to them. It gives them a stake in the success of the business. By extension, it’s also the best way to get the most out of them as employees, which makes the expense of employing them more meaningful and more valuable to the organization.
As the cost of labor rises, being able to attach more corresponding value to that expense by investing in the best performers just makes sense. Collecting and reporting on real business data like this, held in the cloud and accessible while on the move via mobile devices can serve the brand, individual operators, and ultimately employees too.
What do your employees want from a Schedule?
Certainty
Employees want to be able to plan their lives for more than a few days in advance. They want to be able to rely on their managers and be reassured they won’t be messed around and can count on the schedule accuracy first time round. This avoids employees making unnecessary journeys to work or getting annoyed if there has been a mix up of shifts - especially without being notified
Stability
The majority of staff only have one job and strongly rely wages of that job. Therefore, they want their hours to be guaranteed and roughly the same every week to help them manage their money effectively. They prefer it when managers base the rota on a set pattern, so they can be reasonably certain of their hours before the rota has even been published. If managers drastically change staff hours from week to week, you’ll get some angry and upset employees.
Mobile Compatibility
Mobile-first WFM solutions will be co-assisted with an app that needs to be manageable and as simple as other apps they may use on the daily. Taking this approach allows you to get into more detail that you may not have considered before – peak times, management level on each shift, number of employees needed for each time slot; in turn, this drives sales. These are the kind of results we want to deliver on and lead to a happier workplace overall.
Notified of changes
Every time there’s a change to the rota, employees want to be made aware of these changes; especially if it involves them. Whether this is change of starting time, swapping shifts with another employee or even last minute emergencies of needing to close. An effective communication system must be in place to prevent rota communication problems and confusions.
Shift run-down
Employees always like to have a rough idea of what they are going to walk into when they arrive to work. Yes, the majority of shifts will be the same responsibilities and roles but even finer details of who is opening or closing the store for that day, whether they have larger parties in or perhaps if they are on a training course that day. Providing a brief outline of what to expect can prepare your employees in the best way for their shift.
Rules, Rules, Rules!
Scheduling rules based on these factors may also be unique to your organization, so clear guidelines are extremely important. To avoid confusion, make sure that all managers understand the policies or rules before shifts are assigned.
Training and Certifications
Do particular shifts require personnel who are certified with specific training? If so, put rules in place to ensure only people with current certifications are considered for assignment during those shifts.
Seniority
Is seniority status given to employees for certain shifts? Those guidelines will need to be reflected during scheduling as well.
Compliance to Safety, Employment, and Labor Laws
Ensure staff aren't working longer than is allowed by law and what is outlined in their contract. You’ll also need to track and comply with any internal or external overtime restrictions.
Employee Performance
Sometimes, you need your best people on the job, but identifying them can be difficult. This is especially true in large or complex organizations where staff take on multiple roles. Track performance ratings, so you know who to schedule when it matters most.
Scheduling with intentionality is critical for maximizing daily productivity on every shift. How can you achieve this? Let’s look at the criteria below:
Availability
From Holiday requests to leaves of various kinds, employee availability issues are the number one driver of schedule changes. During the pandemic, employers must also consider employees’ requests for schedule changes due to fluctuating school schedules for kids, caring for loved ones with COVID-19, and when they’ve had exposure and are required to isolate.
Preferences
When you take employee preferences into account, you reduce change requests. More importantly, you improve employee satisfaction while lowering absenteeism and turnover
Rich Profile Configuration
You likely have extensive information on your employees that you need to leverage in scheduling and reporting. This information often includes role, job-level, credentials, seniority, pay rates, and availability preferences for each employee.
Automating Shift Assignment
Assigning shifts is typically the most time consuming portion of the scheduling process. Manually matching people with positions is difficult and keeping all the details straight sounds easier than it is. Employee scheduling software can help. Bizimply allows you to copy weekly schedules to save time in this area whilst encompassing the rules we discussed above.
Forecasting Accuracy
Comparing forecasted to actual resource demand is a key review point. As you are creating schedules, you have a unique perspective. Use this to your advantage to review variances and collaborate across your organization to improve your predictive accuracy. You would be surprised how a minor improvement can impact your business overall!
Managing Resources
It is critical to monitor and measure the health of your labor resource. Consider the time period and expected demand when reviewing employee availability. Are you coming into Summer where increase in holiday requests occur but also footfall increases too? Preparing for this spike means you can proactively adjust the schedule due to the information being integrated. Also, monitoring resource pools tied to critical positions will ensure you always fill them with the best talent. If you are using employee scheduling software, you have a valuable data source so you're on the right track!
Workforce Scheduling Processes
Review key processes with other schedulers, management, and employees and regularly test ideas to evaluate if you observed any improvements. In shift-based work environments, the schedule has a significant impact on employee productivity and morale. Employee feedback will reveal factors that may be difficult to see from a scheduling perspective
Forecasts: Why are they important?
In order to build a smart schedule, forecasts are essential. It provides you with the ability to present a forecast to local managers for them to edit or have as context when scheduling. Forecasts may be presented on a software ready to go, or the tool may use historical data to generate the forecast. They are the difference between turning a profit and making a loss. Executing advanced, on-demand forecasting, allows you to create optimal schedules based on your projections and historical data. When you balance your planned costs against your results, you create the most profitable resource plan. Proficient forecasting goes hand in hand with smarter scheduling and gives you the data that is necessary for you to know you’ve got the right employees working your shifts!
Is It Time to Say Goodbye to Full-Time Shifts?
We need to think about what goes on in the day-to-day lives of our customers to cause peaks in volumes, before considering how we balance that. When thinking about this, we will likely find that, depending on opening hours, offering just full-time shifts is no longer valid. You must establish a goal and have a clear understanding of the true cost of delivery. Run the numbers: You can do this by dividing your delivery labor spent by your delivery sales. Additionally, you must look at the price of the menu item, the taxes of said item(s), the delivery fee, fuel required, and the salary of delivery drivers. There is a lot to consider when setting your labor target.
