Labor Cost Control For The Restaurant Industry

Labor cost control is an ongoing challenge that all restaurants face. In a highly competitive market place, employee retention is necessary for sustaining a professional level of customer service. By maintaining appropriate staff levels you will also positively impact labor costs. Coming from a company with over half-a-million users and an industry leading 99% customer satisfaction rate, accurately scheduling your employees will result in a more efficient business.

Deviation from your budgeted forecast creates a variance that can increase your overall labor costs. An effective schedule, however, utilizes current staff and avoids unnecessary cost adjustments. HotSchedules maximizes a restaurant's guest service level by using past operating trends to provide insight on future staffing. Our tools give you the ability to create multiple schedule templates from which managers can select based on projected hours and costs for each shift. Effectively scheduling your staff this way will result in greater labor efficiency.

The three main factors when considering restaurant labor forecasting are:

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Restaurant Employee Scheduling and Labor Management

As every restaurant owner knows, employee payroll is one of the largest variable expenses that any business will incur, and the ability to efficiently manage employee schedules is often a tedious and time-consuming task. After a weekend in the weeds, the restaurant manager must rummage through unsorted piles of crumpled employee time-off requests, one of greater importance after the other; and somehow end-up with a schedule that satisfies the entire staff, both the kitchen and the floor. Not to mention the schedule creator must continuously monitor all labor and payroll forecasts; and once completed, it is also up to the manager to ensure that the updated work schedule is successfully communicated and easily accessible to employees. With that being said, restaurant employee scheduling shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be this difficult. 

 Recent data shows that most business managers spend at least 2.5 hours every single week dedicated to creating, updating, and managing their company's employee staff schedules. Throw in some shift-swaps, unplanned staff call-ins and high turnover rates, and it's easy to see how the best of managers can become overwhelmed and frustrated at this weekly responsibility. 

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