For the past year at The Rail, we have been focused on the debilitating costs of turnover for restaurant operators. In our highly accessed webinar and resource guide on the War for Talent, we assert that turnover costs for the average restaurant are as high as $146,600 annually. Couple that with five-year trend of increasing turnover in our industry and you have a recipe for real trouble in your business.
While there are many ways to improve your turnover performance, none is as potent and immediately impactful as great schedules.
How, you ask?
The schedule is the center-point of managing the employee experience in your restaurant. Every shift has to be scheduled.
- Their training is controlled by the schedule.
- Who they work with is impacted by scheduling.
- How much they earn is dictated by their schedule.
In fact, many times their overall work satisfaction is significantly influenced by their schedule.
Great schedules require time, care, planning, and maintenance. This can be a costly endeavor, but it’s not something you should short change. You need to connect to any best practices that will improve your scheduling performance.
Think in terms of food production. You wouldn’t eliminate the recipes from the food you create, right? That would cause chaos and inconsistency in the product you deliver to guests. The same is true for scheduling. All operators need to embrace digital & online scheduling.
Using our recipe analogy, any great schedule is made of various ingredients. Things like:
- Employee availability
- Time off requests
- Sales projections
These all factor into how a schedule is built. With digital schedules, you eliminate much of the chaos of the schedule process. Gone are tensions surrounding shift-change management or questions about days off requests being “lost.”
Instead it provides a transparent approach to the process and improves the schedule writing process. Using a platform designed to facilitate better scheduling will improve your operation and likely reduce your turnover – which will save you a ton of cash.
With the cost of these services so low now, if you save only one employee from leaving by improving your scheduling process you have created real value in your business.
Be sure to check out our Building the Perfect Online Schedule in partnership with HotSchedules. It's specifically intended to give you a primer to what great digital schedule implementation looks like. Some of what we have provided is traditional management insights and some is specific to writing schedules on a digital platform. The intention is to show you what start to finish great process looks like for schedule writing and how to incorporate a digital platform to make it the best it can be.
