Simple Tactics to Help Reduce Your Restaurant Labor Costs
Minimum wage rate hikes and overtime pay laws are putting a strain on many managers and owners to cut back on total labor spending. Prioritizing your scheduling can help lower these expenditures. Learn how to manage labor costs in a restaurant with the following tips.
1. Learn Your Employees Preferred Shifts
If you ask about preferred shifts and schedule your staff accordingly, you’ll be able to reduce:
- Call-outs
- Overtime
- Incompatible schedules
Knowing which schedules work best for your employees, you’ll reduce a lot of additional spending, such as overtime for a cook who has to cover the worker’s shift when they can’t make it to you.
2. Analyze Your Operation Trends
Track your day-to-day operations, and over time, you’ll be able to cut down staff that may not be necessary on certain days or shifts. When managers watch service trends, they’ll be able to make schedules a week or two in advance to help make the entire restaurant more efficient.
Scheduling should also be done based on sales forecasts. For example, let’s assume that you need to have 15 employees working on a Friday night during your busy season. Knowing your service trends, you determine that sales fall by 30% after August 30 when your busy season comes to an end. If you still have 15 employees on the floor, you’re going to increase your labor costs for no reason.
You need to use previous data to be able to predict sales accurately. When you’re able to predict sales, you’ll be able to schedule the right number of employees — whether it’s more or less.
3. Don’t Be Afraid to Invest in Scheduling Tools
When you invest in scheduling tools, you’re able to help automate shift management and provide managers with the tools they need to work faster. Management costs will fall, double scheduling will not occur and employees will be kept happier because of accurate scheduling with no conflicts.
4. Incorporate Employee Collaboration Tools
Managing schedules is a lot easier and less timely when there are collaboration tools in place.
Consider using the following collaboration methods:
- Employee-only Facebook groups
- Email distribution lists
- In-house software
If the person who normally does scheduling is overwhelmed, it may be time to have a new set of eyes look over the process. Perhaps you can hire someone to analyze the scheduling so that you can lower management costs, labor costs and run a better service.
5. Schedule Fewer Employees
Having more employees doesn’t mean that the customer experience or service will be better. The goal is to ensure that scheduling allows for orders to flow, but you don’t want:
- Employees working at half speed
- Employees sitting around bored
- Employees with nothing to do
A lot of owners will schedule to the point where they think that they’ll need just one additional person on the floor. The lack of the extra person keeps staff moving, reduces wasted time and sitting around, and pushes employees with a “sense of urgency.”
6. Remove or Retrain Underperforming Staff Members
If you can crunch the numbers, you’ll be able to determine which staff members are most efficient. Perhaps every server on the floor is able to handle 25 tables a night, but there’s one employee who can only handle 12. You need to retrain this employee so that they can be more efficient in their position.
With that said, if an employee routinely underperforms, it may be time to terminate them and hire someone who is not cutting into labor costs unnecessarily.
Working together with employees and management will be able to provide insights into what works best for your restaurant. You may find that small changes can lead to a big difference in the efficiency of your workforce. A more efficient, lean workforce is one that meets the demands of customers while also lowering overall restaurant costs in the process.
Source: https://mcdonaldpaper.com/blog/restaurant-labor-scheduling
