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People don’t just leave bad managers...They also leave bad schedules

Mobile tools help your team plan ahead, and when the schedule finds its way to mobile phones, you can kiss the 'I didn’t know' excuse goodbye.

October 27, 2014 by Nate DaPore — President and CEO, PeopleMatter

Putting out fires isn’t just a job for firefighters. In the restaurant world, a typical day is full of pop-up fires, in the figurative sense, of course. A salty customer, a no-show team member, a busier-than-usual late lunch crowd on a Tuesday, or the day someone dropped the ball and forgot to order more [insert most important menu item here]. Most of those everyday problems could be helped – or straight up avoided – with one thing: a better schedule.

Your people are real people. They get sick. They have bad days. They have family emergencies. They’re doing more for less, and they’re probably picking up someone else’s slack. Employees can be unpredictable, but limiting their unpredictability boils down to scheduling and ensuring you’re the early- and over-communicator, fair, respectful and empathetic.        

Not knowing your schedule makes you feel like you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place – week after week. You can’t make plans. You can’t schedule that much-needed doctor’s appointment. You can’t offer to be the kids’ carpool pick-up. When you stop respecting your team members’ schedules, they’ll undoubtedly stop respecting you.

The nature of the restaurant industry – the weekly ebb and flow of customers, the seasonality and tight margins – doesn’t make it easy to create a fair and predictable schedule, but technology does. Think about your managers’ typical “scheduling day.” It probably goes something like this:

• Spend hours sifting through team member availabilities to finally create a schedule that will work (instead of being on the floor where you’re most needed)
• Post the schedule on the back wall a few days ahead of time (instead of giving team members ample notice to plan ahead)
• Freak out as one of two things happen: You have several no-shows or late arrivals because someone “didn’t know they were supposed to work” since they didn’t see the posted spreadsheet; Your phone blows up with complaints, shift change requests, etc.
• Spend more hours trying to fix the errors and find replacements
• Get really frustrated and deal with equally frustrated team members

There’s nothing fun about that scenario. It’s lose-lose. But here’s the good news: there are great online tools out there to help you manage the whirlwind that is schedule creation. With so many choices, it can be tough to know where to start, but I think there are a few key things to look out for when trying to improve scheduling efficiency and, in return, the livelihood of your team members.

Mobile capabilities

Every time managers publish a schedule or make a change, all of the details need to be available to your team anytime, anywhere from the one thing that’s always with them – their mobile phone. Whether it’s through a smartphone app, text, online or email, mobile tools help your on-the-go team plan ahead. And when your schedule finds its way to their mobile phones, you can kiss the “I didn’t know” excuse goodbye.

Real-time reporting

Nothing drives customer service like having the right people on the floor at the right time. But let’s face it. Labor needs are constantly changing. That’s why it’s so important to be able to make changes as often as you need and get real-time reports when you need them. With a big picture view, you can analyze past scheduling data to determine what worked well – and what didn’t. Having the tools to keep track of labor costs ensures your bottom line is in line, the right people with the right skills are on the schedule and your customers are having a great experience.

Easy-to-use/read scheduling tools

Templates, color-coding and alerts make it easy to make team member schedules and find ways to make them better. You need easy-to-create templates that allow you to copy and paste successful schedules and push them out quickly, saving you time and money. Color coding should make it easy to pick out possible errors in your planned schedule, and pop-up warnings should alert you to double check certain scenarios that may not work, such as scheduling someone who may be on vacation, venturing into the overtime territory or leaving a shift uncovered.

Seamless third-party integrations

Running a successful foodservice business means making sure your people, processes and technology work in harmony. But to do that, you need to connect your people management data to your business data. Your scheduling system needs to plug into your Point of Sale (POS) and Time & Attendance (T&A) systems, so you can compare plans versus actuals, and produce reports that show historical sales patterns. That kind of two-way integration is all about making sure you have company-wide scheduling visibility and efficiency.

More team member engagement

Even the best-laid schedule plan rarely survives the daily grind. That’s why it’s super important to ensure it’s easy for team members to check schedules, request time off and offer to fill in the gaps in shift coverage. It’s just as important to have mobile scheduling tools for your team members as it is for your managers. By giving them more control over their schedules, you’re saying, “I care about your schedule and your life outside of work.” When team members feel like it’s easy to reach you about their scheduling needs and get requests approved/declined quickly, it makes them feel valued and respected. According to the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council, team members who feel like their employer provides schedule flexibility stay 9 percent longer than those who don’t. And we could all use a little less turnover.

It’s not the company they’re leaving...it’s you...and their schedule

In the average workplace, management complaints are a dime a dozen. And a lot of them stem from crappy scheduling. A crappy schedule is bad for everyone – managers, team members and customers. In fact, a study from Aberdeen found that high schedule accuracy (fewer changes and incorporating team member requests and preferences upfront) leads to 2.6-times greater increases in customer satisfaction. And if that doesn’t make you want to consider your team’s workplace happiness, nothing will.

You’ve probably heard the old career adage that “people don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers.” But I’m willing to bet they leave bad schedules, too.

About Nate DaPore

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