Some things about restaurants never change, like the need to serve wonderful food in an atmosphere your customers enjoy. But behind the scenes, today's restaurants use modern tools to help manage employees in a way that makes them nothing like restaurants from even a decade ago.
Read on to see how employee scheduling software is reinventing how contemporary restaurants use technology to help manage employees.
Responsive Schedules, Quickly
Employee scheduling software can create a schedule that reflects every staff member's needs in up to 80% less time than it would otherwise take, freeing up your employees to work where they're most valuable. Cutting back the time wasted on secondary tasks keeps your employees fresh, and makes management easier.
The amount of phone calls and texts required outside of work to iron out the schedule are also reduced by up to 70%, making this frustrating and time-consuming process easier still.
Stay Connected, Efficiently
Modern communication devices can be a double-edged sword: tools that keep people connected constantly is essential in business, but sometimes too much back and forth ends up wasting time. The best employee scheduling app on the market is able to deliver effective tools to keep staff linked up: there is a chat feature, and employees can also share pictures, GIFs, and more.
But managers can also limit communications when needed. An announcement tool lets managers send a one-way message to employees for times when, for example, they need to inform them about a daily special, or some other message that doesn't require any dialogue.
Get the Numbers Crunched
Employee scheduling software relays to your managers and executives the numbers underlying every aspect of their restaurant. Manager-facing dashboards clearly present stats like total sales, labor costs, labor as a percentage, and more. Plus you can customize the software to track whatever data is of unique importance to your restaurant.
Plus, because the app is cloud-based the information is always in real-time, and the logs are accessible from anywhere and impossible to lose. Managers receive an email when an entry is completed, so there's no lag and they read the data right away.
Employee Feedback
Sometimes there are important aspects of the restaurant's operations that don't get told in hard numbers. That's why employee scheduling software has a dedicated space for employees to rate each shift, and describe in their own words how they think it went.
This gives managers insights into what is happening on the ground-level. Managers need to get data that is not just reliable but describes the full picture of their operation, and software that combines vital statistics with the personal perspective of all your frontline staff does just this.
Tricks that restaurants relied on years ago to help manage staff may not be as effective in an era with powerful custom tools designed to help restaurants. Serving delicious food will keep customers coming back, but if you want help making your staff happy, your restaurant needs employee scheduling software.