Many restaurants are suffering a staff scheduling headache, managing staff rotas with manual processes such as using a pen-and-paper spreadsheet. Today there’s a painkiller for that headache — automatic scheduling, courtesy of specialist software, which we outline in this article.
How many pen-and-paper processes would your restaurant like to get rid of? Maybe your staff are unaware of the time-saving benefits of restaurant software? Talk to us and discover more about today’s greatest options.
Summary — What’s Inside:
Planning for who work when is a regular routine for restaurant managers. This is to show staff what hours they work in coming weeks and months. As such restaurants create schedules to:
Restaurant scheduling software is the digital form of this process. It allows both restaurants and their teams to access a digital overview, looking at digital management. In short, software:
Software transfers all the everyday scheduling processes to one centralised space, allowing restaurants to build, adapt, and edit digital staff schedules with creation tools — namely including automatic restaurant scheduling.
Manual staff schedules are thankless tasks. Restaurant managers assigning staff to various shifts need to think hard about the best team members to pick for certain hours. Otherwise, manual schedules can:
Automated scheduling, on the other hand, helps restaurants that have encountered these problems before. In sum, it’s a time saver, that uses specialist online features. Here’s a quick run through.
Automated scheduling is a great tool to create the best restaurant schedules, but managers should always remember a key component that makes them work: human input.
Algorithms don’t absolutely govern the operations of a system’s auto scheduling function. Rather, they rely on a manager’s input. The more information both restaurant employees and managers put into a system, the better and more accurate an auto-scheduling function will work. A system collects employee data via an internal profiling system.
Staff can adjust their profiles in a staff scheduling system to help create better rotas. It is in everyone’s interest to do so, and therefore this helps create flexible staff schedules for teams to operate within. As such, the human touch is how it works — smart scheduling, in other words.
An automated system adjusted to the needs and preferences of employees saves restaurants heaps of time.
Manage a better restaurant. Real-time data and updates enable restaurants to make better staff scheduling decisions. With the helping hand of the web, restaurants can now manage better teams.
Automated scheduling is an intelligent way to craft staff rotas on the go. Now restaurants can concentrate on other processes indoors, attending to everyday customer demands.
Auto scheduling automates the tricky preparation that goes into rota creation. Since auto schedule are fast, staff find out their hours sooner, and thus enjoy increased job flexibility. Research has shown that today’s workforce prefer this treatment. A paper by Chicago academics observed the increase in job satisfaction among staff with greater role flexibility.
Plus restaurant operators should note that they’re working with a smartphone-ready workforce. Millions of smartphone users worldwide prefer to manage tasks from their palm.
Likewise, employees with smartphones appreciate a mobile-first platform that can keep them up-to-date on the hours they work. Increased visibility makes a huge difference compared to the age-old alternative, having to journey to the restaurant back-of-house noticeboard again and again to check up on working hours.
Today’s restaurant scheduling software options help foster greater certainty surrounding a vital process in the industry. Integrating other software options can help further boost the efficiency of a restaurant’s indoor processes. For example, like scheduling software, online reservations help restaurants predict the shape of things to come — and they can now use this software for free.
If you liked this guide, read more about Carbonara App’s extra features and digest our article called “5 Myths About Long Queues Restaurants Need to Know” for the best advice on how restaurants should handle steady streams of guests, transforming a customer inflow into a digital waiting list.