How Restaurant Employee Scheduling Software Can Help the Managers

If you’re running a restaurant, there’s a good chance that creating work schedules for your team is one of the most difficult tasks that you face every week. Scheduling hourly workers is no easy task, no matter what industry you are in. But it’s especially taxing in the restaurant industry, just because there are so many positions that you need to take into consideration.

From the back of the house to the front, you have to schedule chefs, servers, hosts, bartenders, dishwashers and a number of different positions every single day. And to make things even hard, the same people hardly ever work the same shifts week in and week out. If you are running a restaurant and still using methods such as pen and paper or Excel spreadsheets to create your work schedules, you are probably spending a lot more time than you have to in order to create them.

Finding a better way to manage your restaurant schedules not only helps managers by decreasing the time it takes them to perform this task every week, it also makes life a lot easier for employees. When restaurant managers spend less time scheduling, they have more time to focus on innovating the business – developing the menu, coming up with promotions, stepping up their marketing projects – for example.

When employees have a better way to get their schedules in their hands every week, they have less stress and are able to work more comfortably and productively. When you’re making schedules for 9-5 workers, then pen and paper or Excel are fine. But when you are tackling the complex mission of scheduling a rotating lineup of hourly restaurant workers, you need something better – something more advanced.

What you need is online employee scheduling and workforce management software like Humanity. Switching to a modern, intuitive solution like Humanity will save you time and money every month. The application practically pays for itself.

Here are some of the immediate benefits that will come from switching to a modern employee scheduling solution like Humanity:

Avoiding Human Error

Every time you make an error in your schedule, you are potentially losing a lot of money. If you make an error and don’t schedule enough servers for a busy night, you’re letting a lot of money walk out the door.

If you forget to schedule a shift and then have to spend the next hour calling your restaurant employees and trying to find a last-minute replacement, your customers are going to notice and they are not going to be happy. Humanity makes it impossible for you to make these kinds of mistakes. It’s an intuitive application that lets you know when you’ve left a shift open or scheduled a conflict. The fewer mistakes you make, the less money you lose.

Having All the Scheduling Data You Need on Hand

What if you could have all the data you need to create optimal restaurant schedules right at your fingertips at all times? What if there was a way that you could integrate your point-of-sale information into your scheduling process so that you can predict your busiest times of the day and week in order to create perfect schedules ahead of time? Humanity makes those “what ifs” a reality.

The application can easily integrate with a variety of other popular business software that you use every day to make your business run better. With Humanity, you’re not only scheduling your restaurant staff more efficiently, you’re scheduling smarter with more intel on your side.

Having Customizable, Tailor-Made Solutions

Every restaurant is different. Whether you are running a food truck or a five-eatery, Humanity can be molded to suit your needs. Not only is Humanity incredibly robust and powerful, it’s also highly customizable. The ability to personalize the application to meet your needs is enormous.

You can create custom positions and roles, make your own rate cards for payroll, manage several locations from one account. You can even move elements on your Dashboard to make sure that you’re seeing the data that’s most important to you at all times. No matter what type of restaurant you run and how many employees work for you, Humanity can help you to make your restaurant run more efficiently than ever before.

How Restaurant Employee Scheduling Software Helps You Manage Your Staff More Efficiently

If you’re looking to cut costs, save time and optimize the way you schedule your restaurant staff all at once, Humanity could be the perfect solution for you. Not convinced? Here are some of the many ways that introducing scheduling software to your team can change the way you run your restaurant for the better.

More Efficient Scheduling

Humanity is the number one online scheduling software in the restaurant industry for a reason. We’ve helped dozens of restaurants all around the world by making their scheduling processes less time consuming and more efficient. Here’s how we do it.

High-Level Customization

Every restaurant comes with its own specific set of needs, and Humanity understands that. For this reason, the application was designed to be very customizable to fit your restaurant’s needs specifically. You can easily create custom roles and locations for your restaurant, make your own rate cards for overtime and any other pay rates you want to introduce. If you’re paying someone a fixed rate for cleaning your restaurant at the end of the night instead of paying them by the hour, you can set up fixed rates as well.

With many years on the market, Humanity has created a huge feature set that includes a vast amount of options that cover just about every need that a restaurant owner could think of when it comes to managing his or her staff. Just about every aspect of Humanity can be personalized, from the way it looks and feels, down to the most minute details of your scheduling and payroll process.

Intelligent Scheduling

Humanity can go beyond simply scheduling, it can integrate data from other sources to not only make your scheduling process easier but more intelligent as well. As a restaurant owner or manager, there are probably a bunch of other business tools that you use in your everyday tasks. You’re probably using a payroll service to pay your employees. You might even be using a point-of-sale system as well. Humanity was built as a platform that can be easily integrated and synced with a huge variety of applications that you are already using.

That not only means that you can import and sync data between Humanity and other applications, you can also integrate that data to improve your scheduling process. Say you’re using a POS system that is giving you clear data on when your peak hours are each week or month and is measuring the foot traffic in your restaurant. You can easily sync and integrate that data into your scheduling process so that you can then make predictions and schedule your staff according to the number of guests you expect to have during certain times of the day or days of the week.

Decreasing Staff Turnover

The restaurant industry is at the top of the list when it comes to industries in which the employee turnover rate is a serious problem. A lot of that employee frustration comes from a lack of transparency and communication, especially when it comes to scheduling. Humanity is a tool that helps restaurant employees as much as it helps managers. Here’s are a few reasons why employees love using Humanity as well:

Team Transparency

Employees want to feel as if they are truly a part of something. They want to know where they stand and they want to be involved in the workplace as much as possible. Humanity levels the playing field considerably and keeps employees in the loop so that they always know where they stand. Often, restaurant employees get frustrated when they don’t get their schedules on time or when they don’t know who they are working with on the shift.

Also, it can be frustrating to want to swap a shift with a co-worker, but having to go through a complex and long-winding process to achieve that simple action. Humanity puts an end to all that and puts the employees in the driver’s seat. As soon as a manager publishes a new shift, the restaurant staff is sent emails and SMS messages, letting them know when they are scheduled to work. If the manager decides to make any changes to the shifts, employee are notified immediately of any and all changes as well. They don’t have to check Humanity every hour to see if there’s anything new happening with their shifts. Humanity lets them know automatically.

As an employee, you can check your schedule at any time, anywhere, using any device. Humanity keeps your restaurant employees better connected with management, which in turn leads to better communication, improved morale and less staff wanting to leave your restaurant. We all know how expensive it is to lose employees and have to find replacements, so by keeping your restaurant staff happy and with you, Humanity is once again helping you save money.

Staff Autonomy

It has also been proven in many workplace satisfaction and engagement studies that employees desire more independence in the workplace. They want to know that their managers trust them and that they care about the input of the employees. You can give your restaurant workers a whole new level of autonomy by introducing Humanity to your business.

The best thing about giving your restaurant employees an added level of independence is that it benefits both staff and management. Using Humanity, employees can input their availability preferences. This lets managers know when they prefer to work and if they have any hours of the day or days of the week that they can’t take shifts. With the availability feature, Humanity not only gives restaurant employees a voice, it also gives managers relevant data that is going to help them create better schedules that work for both them and their staff.

Humanity also enables your restaurant staff to initiate shift trade requests on their own. So if one of your servers or waiters needs to take a day off and knows a co-worker that would be able to switch shifts with them, that employee can put in a request to management directly and all management has to do is either approve or reject the request.

More employee independence means high morale and better engagement for your restaurant staff and more time for managers to focus on growing their restaurants instead of simply running them.

A Recap of Restaurant Employee Scheduling Software Benefits:

Better Scheduling

• Save Time
  Manage every facet of your restaurant business with one tool
• Save Money
  Never worry about over or understaffing at your restaurant again
• Multiple Locations
  Manage more than one restaurant location with just one account

Decreased Staff Turnover

• Staff Independence
  Make your work easier by giving your restaurant staff autonomy
• Ensures Adequate Staff
  Integrate point-of-sale data to know when you need more or less staff
• Empowers Employees
  Let your restaurant staff submit their availability and shift preferences

Simpler Processes

• Notification System
  Send shift updates to your restaurant staff via SMS and email
• Integrated Training
  Create detailed training and onboarding for staff in app
• Shift Trades
  Let your restaurant employees organize shift swaps independently