Category Archives: Management is killing me

There is nothing more intimidating to a new manager than completing that employee schedule for the first time. Countless factors need to be taken into consideration, including staff roster layout, employee scheduling requirements, and the business needs of customers during each shift. As a new manager, it is absolutely important that your employee scheduling approach be as simple and efficient as possible.

Preparing a staff roster layout might be as simple as borrowing what has been used in the past, or as complicated as figuring out seniority within a new business. Whatever problems you face during employee scheduling, the primary issue you face is maintaining efficient use of your time while optimizing the sales for the company.

This might sound counter-intuitive for someone just wanting to prepare an employee schedule or staff roster, but the way you arrange scheduling can directly affect sales. As a new manager, you should focus your learning efforts to really understand how these issues can affect customer satisfaction and ticket averages.

Probably the greatest hurdle you face as a manager preparing employee schedules and working on staff scheduling is the picky requirements of work schedules for each employee. Some can work only on weekday afternoons, while some need the second Monday of every month off, but only on odd months. It is enough to drive a manager bonkers, but employee scheduling is still something that can’t be put off - without the schedule, customers will not receive the service they expect. Without an efficient schedule, in other words, your business cannot grow.

Customer needs are an important aspect to consider as you prepare your staff scheduled and begin to learn more about employee scheduling. You need to learn quickly when the highest sale volumes occur and provide employee scheduling to suit those needs.

When you know that Tuesdays are a quiet day, you can be reasonably sure that a few less employees placed on that day will effectively save the business money. On the other hand, if you know that weekends are usually very busy, that is a time during the week when you should not try to reduce employee scheduling numbers to save money. Sometimes more is more, and sometimes less is more. That is business.

Any manager with even just one employee scheduling experience under his or her belt will tell you it is not as easy as it sounds. Add to that the knowledge that effective employee scheduling and staff roster management can directly influence the success of your business, and you will quickly see why many managers turn to employee scheduling tools and software to meet their analysis and efficiency targets.

In reality, once you are prepared with appropriate employee scheduling tools, and have done your research into business specific trends in terms of sales and customer ticket averages, you are well on your way to becoming a successful employee scheduling manager. The main thing to remember is to keep your cool and focus on the facts. Business is all about efficiency and cost control, so keep your mind straight and narrow on those issues and you will do fine.

Summer is coming (at least on the northern hemisphere) – are you ready to handle that in your employee scheduling?

The weather is one of the main factors affecting the staffing needs for a small business. When the summer is coming and the sun is shining – people tend to go outside and that opens op for a lot of business.

An extra employee shift schedule for the season

Staffing needs are indeed different in the summertime – many have two times more tables to serve when people are suddenly able to sit outside. You need to able to handle that in your employee shift scheduling or you might end up being under staffed (see this article about what that can do to your business). It’s like having a whole new department you suddenly need to staff.

Staffing needs change with the season

So are you ready for that? Because summer is just around the corner?

5 Things to keep an eye on

1. How many hours of coverage do I already have on each employee role? How does the staff roster look for waiters, dish washers etc…

2. How many people will I need when we open up for serving people outside? (Or just get more busy due to more people on the street). Match this with no 1. and you have an idea of whether you need to hire further employees.

3. How will the new employee schedule look after I do this? You might be able to find the employee schedule from last years summer – if not – then maybe you should consider using an online system for handling your staff scheduling.

4. Adjust the staff schedule to weather conditions. In the beginning of the week – check out the weather report to get an indication of whether you’ll get busy or not. If sun is shining Thursday then maybe you ought to put in a little extra help to help take care of customers.

5. What else is going on in the city? Summer means parades, cruise ships coming in, tourist, football matches, more events than usual. Make sure you know what’s going in the city and that you are prepared to handle all that extra traffic while still being able to serve customers in a satifsying way.

All this can of course be helped by using an online employee shift scheduling tool – you might want to try that out. The only real important thing is that you feel confident that you have the correct amount of staff to take care of your customers!

When someone doesn’t show up for their shift at work – how much does that (a no-show) cost you? And what can you do about it? This article tries to answer just that for you. This article is meant for people operating a restaurant, café, diner, coffee shop or similar. Most of the arguments are valid for any type of small business however.

It can be costly when employee don't show up on a busy night

The first question to answer is -

Which implications does it have when people don’t show up for their shift?

First and most importantly – it means poor service for your customers. If there are fewer people at work – then chances are that customers will get a poorer service and thus a bad experience. Ultimately if it is a busy day then people might leave your place just because it looks insufficiently staffed. Second, if they actually do sit down at a table they might leave before they are served – talking about the experience to all their friends. Third, if they actually get served, they might just not put that second order for an extra cup of coffee because they can’t be bothered with the waiting time.

How much does that cost you? It depends of course on your prices and the amount of customers that you have on that day – but it can easily result in several hundred dollars per night with a no-show. Then come all the stories and bad PR that the customers who actually stood the waiting time will spread – that’s hard to measure, but bad PR can kill you in the long run.

So is that all, you might ask? No – I’ll argue that there is more to it that can damage your business in the long run. Think about the frustrations that it generates internally between the employees when people don’t show up. Whenever somebody doesn’t show up for their shift – the other guys have to do extra work, run faster, wait on more customers etc. Not funny to suddenly have 50% extra tables to watch out for during a night. As an employee you will have a heck of a time running between customers to try and satisfy everybody knowing that you probably don’t. That’s simply not cool when it could have been a good night where you could have had the extra it takes to up sell with a better wine, another meat dish, dessert etc. while keeping the customers happy and leaving them with a feeling of being well looked after.

If that’s how the other employees experience it then it will result in poor team spirit for everybody. Eventually employees may quit because of this – how much does it cost you to train a new employee?

Furthermore customers can easily feel the difference between a good and a bad team spirit. If the people serving me seem to get a long good with each other and have a good time – then chances are that I will tolerate mistakes better and still have a pleasant dining experience. If they work as a team then they will probably also handle mistakes better – not blaming each other, handling it with a smile etc.

So why don’t people show up? Seems like it is a big killer for business…

First reason – they get ill – it happens and there is not much to do about it if it happens just before they had to meet up.

Second reason – perhaps they aren’t committed to their shift schedule? This could be because they had no influence on how it came to look like? I’m more likely to accept a shift for the third friday in a row if I had a chance to actually influence the creation of the schedule by applying for days off and having the chance to tell when I’m busy doing other things and would rather not be working. It can be a big puzzle for the one doing the work schedule but as an employee it really matters to me.

Third reason – If the employee schedule is in paper form then the employee in questions might have lost or forgotten how their shift schedule looks like or they don’t have the proper tools to easily access and view the employee schedule.

Fourth reason – things pop up that people prioritize higher than work. You could of course say that you only want staff that have their jobs as no. 1 priority but that isn’t always a realistic thing to assume. So when things actually DO pop up and your employees would rather not be working anyway – it could be a problem if they don’t have the proper tools for trading shifts easily. If they can work it out themselves – it won’t cost you any trouble nor time and you’ll have a happy employee who got to go to that party anyway – leaving him or her with a good story to tell everybody and helping team spirit –> and thus business.

Ok I get it – but what can I do about these employee schedules?

Fist thing you can do is to involve people in the staff scheduling proces. You can either do this on the staff meetings but as this article suggests – it might not be cost effective since you can spend the valuable time talking about more business productive things than a boring work schedule. You can also collect preferences and requests by notes or email – it takes a while to interpret but in the end it will provide a better work schedule that the employees will appreciate. There are also a lot of online applications facilitating and helping out with this proces.

Second thing you can do is to make it absolutely clear who has which shift. Do this by sending out the work schedule by email, snail mail or as a hand out. Make sure that schedules are easy to read and comprehend leaving no doubt about who is working when. Again – this can be done automatically if you are a little internet-savvy.

Third, you can allow and encourage people to trade shifts when things pop up and they are suddenly unhappy with their shifts. Of course you’ll have to make it clear that when a person’s name is on a shift – then it is that person’s own responsibility to find a replacement and not yours. Again you’d have to make that really easy for your employees to keep things from going wrong. Some sort of system to handle this proces can also be a big advantage for you here.

Fortunately – there are some cool Employee Scheduling tools out there that  in an easy way involves your employees and gives them the opportunity to see employee schedules, trade shifts, submit availability etc. One of them is BusyBeeManager that you might want to check out, but there are many more. Learn more about employee scheduling  by subscribing to our blog.

Good luck with getting your no-shows to a minimum!