Recipes for rostering success in hospitality - Why you should do what you love A goRoster eBook
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Recipes for rostering success in hospitality Why you should do what you love A goRoster eBook
INTRODUCTION
6 RECIPES FOR ROSTERING
SUCCESS IN HOSPITALITY
Hospitality can be a wild ride. Creating outstanding experiences
for customers requires a complex and delicate balance of product
and people.
Rostering is a key element to gaining control over the ‘people’
element, as the ability to manage people and the costs associated
with them effectively starts with rostering.
From the many great hospitality providers we work with a few
common recipes for success with rostering consistently emerge,
and are summarised in this ebook. We’d love to discuss further, or
hear your suggestions.
Chris Tacon
You can reach Chris @goRoster or on LinkedIn.
FOLLOW CHRIS ON TWITTER
@CTACON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
RECIPES FOR SUCCESS
#1: DO WHAT YOU LOVE // 4
#2: QUALITY INGREDIENTS // 5
#3: AVOIDING HANGOVERS // 6
#4: HAPPINESS AS A MARKETING TOOL // 7
#5: GETTING YOUR MATCHING RIGHT // 8
#6: COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE // 9
LOVE BEING UNDER CONTROL // 10
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS #1 DO WHAT YOU LOVE Spending a huge amount of time building and communicating rosters and then compiling wage cost and turnover information is not an effective investment of management time. Ingredients • Minimising administration time • Maximising time with staff and customers Did you get into hospitality to sit in a back room on a computer? Wasn’t that for the people that wanted to be accountants? After stocktake, is rostering your worst job? Managing a hospitality business may be fun, but it is also intense and stressful. Spending a huge amount of time building and communicating rosters and then compiling wage cost and turnover information is not an effective investment of management time. The more time you spend on this administrative effort, the less you can spend on coaching staff, reviewing quality and ensuring customers are having a great time in your establishment. Rostering has many variables and doing it manually is a complex, laborious and ultimately inefficient process. Having tools to automate and do your rostering not only saves a lot of time, it can enable you to gain control over staff costs. The best part is that you can have more time to do what you are driven to do – create great experience for patrons rather than being stuck in an office. Use your creativity to make a difference to the customers coming into your venue, not in grappling with a spreadsheet. Also, you can set staff costs targets and measure them in real-time. You have visibility, you are in control. You can focus on what you love, and let a system take care of the rest. 4
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS #2
QUALITY INGREDIENTS
Unless you have the information, you can’t make an
informed decision about getting the right balance of staff
available to ensure you can profitably deliver great service.
Ingredients
• Good rostering decisions depend on quality
information
• Know how different scenarios historically impact your
patronage
• Be clear about costs of rostering decisions
Successful rostering is all about decision-making, which is dependent on information. The quality of your information ‘ingredients’ is what dictates the success
of your rostering decisions. Unless you have the information, you can’t make an informed decision about getting the right balance of staff available to ensure
you can profitably deliver great service.
Hospitality staffing is always a battle, especially matching resources to requirements. Weather, major sporting or cultural events, holiday periods or even road
works can influence patronage significantly.
Making the right decisions about your roster requires quality information about how these events have affected patronage in the past and what staffing levels
where used. Using a rolling spreadsheet keeps a good tab on scheduling the week ahead, but it doesn’t enable you to understand trends and easily plan ahead.
It is also critical to understand the costs of any staffing decisions you make. If you are like the average bar or restaurant, staff are your largest controllable cost
and make up around a third of total operating costs after fixed costs and cost of goods sold.
Imagine being able to save 1% on staff costs, or increase sales per employee by 10%, it goes straight to the bottom line.
5
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS #3 AVOIDING HANGOVERS Rostering is the engine of staff cost control and you need to be on top of it to make money. Ingredients • Tracking actual costs, and actual costs vs turnover • Awareness of hidden costs There is nothing better than a great night in a pumping bar. Patrons are having fun, the atmosphere is wonderful and the money is coming across the counter. The glow you get from this sort of night can give you a false sense of security and give you a ‘hangover’ when the end of month accounts come in. Simply reviewing the profit and loss after the event is closing the gate after the horse has bolted. Is that series of big nights really contributing to your profitability? Are your staff costs really under control? Rostering is where this starts. Getting it right is what drives the optimal staff costing. Time and attendance recording and payroll just fulfil what has happened on the night. Rostering is the engine of staff cost control and you need to be on top of it to make money. The best way to avoid a hangover is having immediate and easy access to good information about your daily wage costs, and how they are tracking against turnover. Being able to review estimated vs actual costs against turnover every day gives you the data you need to make smarter decisions. Hospitality firms get caught by hidden costs such as holiday pay, long service leave or extra taxation (such as ACC levies in New Zealand). These can add anywhere from 10-15% on your wage costs. So it helps to be aware and keep this in mind when you’re doing your budgets. They are the hidden costs of your staff costs which need to be understood as you are building your roster, not lamented about when you get year-end results from the accountant. Ensure those great nights are not an illusion and hidden costs are not eating into your profitability. 6
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS #4
HAPPINESS AS A
MARKETING TOOL
There is the moral responsibility of treating your staff well,
but there are also the real costs of absences, and the
impact of tired and grumpy staff providing poor service.
Ingredients
• Happy staff mean satisfied, returning customers
• Invest in health and safety
In the age of Facebook and instant online reviews, providing a poor customer experience because you don’t have the right number of the right kind of staff can
be fatal.
Rostering so you keep staff satisfied, happy and safe is a core recipe for success. Is everyone getting enough hours? Are you using the best people too much?
Is there good rotation?
Striking the right balance between having too many and too few employees working at any given time can be difficult. Particularly in workplaces where business
tends to come in waves of extreme activity and then lull back such as retail and food service, it’s difficult to schedule a number of eight hour shifts to maximum
efficiency.
A common mistake that can prove very expensive is going the opposite way and spreading your employees too thinly. And as managers will discover this can
have just as negative consequences for both the staff and the business itself.
Health, stress or dissatisfaction all impact your business. There is the moral responsibility of treating your staff well, but there are also the real costs of absences,
and the impact of tired and grumpy staff providing poor service. Double shifts have been proven to increase accidents rates.
Your rostering approach must factor in health and safety. You need to be able to rate staff so you have the right mix of staff on board, monitor how much people
are working, whether the shifts are spread relatively fairly etc. It is a delicate balance that is not easy to get right, even with a relatively small staff.
7
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS #5 GETTING YOUR MATCHING RIGHT The bigger your staffing roster the more important it is to know very clearly who has what skills and experience when you are building rosters. Ingredients • Understand your skill and capability mix • Don’t rely on one person to retain this information Just as a port won’t match a patron’s entrée, having the wrong mix of staff won’t work in your venue. The bigger your staffing roster the more important it is to know very clearly who has what skills and experience when you are building rosters. How many barman vs wait staff do you need? Who has cocktail experience? Who knows what languages etc? You need to be able to track these pieces of information and then search your staff database as you build rosters. You should be able to tag all staff with their default roles as well as any specialty skills that are relevant. The risk, especially with a large crew, is that the roster manager has all of this knowledge in their head, building rosters with it on the fly. As soon as they are sick or away you have a problem. Your rostering approach should be smart enough to not rely on one person, and to help you understand what mix of skills are needed. 8
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS #6
COMMUNICATE,
COMMUNICATE,
COMMUNICATE
Effective roster communication is about
‘shared understanding’.
Ingredients
• Communicate easily, cheaply, quickly
• Achieve shared understanding
Rostering is as much a communication challenge as a logistical one. You have to be doing both effectively to deliver rosters that control staff costs and contribute
to the bottom line.
A customer of ours did an exercise recently calculating the average of a “no-show” i.e. where a rostering staff member doesn’t turn up and has to be replaced by
temporary labour or covered by other staff. Each no-show costs $200 – which over a year can have a major impact on profitability, other staff and the customer
experience.
Effective roster communication is about ‘shared understanding’. You need the most efficient method for communicating the roster to staff, but you also need a
mechanism for them to indicate that they have read and understood what is required of them. The larger and more complex your workforce, the more important
this element of rostering becomes.
The demographic of most hospitality staff means mobile communication (via SMS) is a key tool. Being able to automatically communicate by mobile phone, and
securing their confirmation of understanding can virtually eliminate unexpected no-shows.
9LOVE BEING UNDER
CONTROL
Getting your staffing under control is a key to being able to really do what
you love in a hospitality business. That control starts with an effective
approach to rostering, an approach that enables you to have the right mix
of staff working at the right cost.
We’ve been lucky enough to work with some outstanding hospitality
providers, from bars to restaurants to major event venues, and observed
the recipes for success outlined in this eBook.
If you’d like to know how to practically apply some of these recipes for
success, register for a free trial of goRoster today.
Click on the heart to get some love
today, with a free trial for 14 days.
goroster.com
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