Workforce Management in Restaurant Recovery
Restaurants have finally entered a post-COVID recovery period. Still, you won’t get back to your previous level of success overnight. As customers feel more comfortable dining out, you’ll need to hire back more workers to take the load off the current staff. Building back your team, ensuring they’re happy, and effective workforce management will require strategic planning for good ROI.
Photo courtesy of eatOS
What Makes Effective Workforce Management?
Be upfront with employees. When they know exactly what management expects, they can approach the role more effectively. Certain job responsibilities may have changed during the pandemic, given how much it affected our approach to food service in general. Consider what trends the next year will bring when creating new employee expectations, too. Whatever daily tasks you want each role to fulfill, clearly lay it out in the employee handbook so they can consult back anytime they have questions.
Remember to take into account CDC and local guidelines, too. These will evolve as we continue to vaccinate Americans and safely reopen restaurants to full capacity. It can be helpful to subscribe to relevant newsletters and befriend other restaurants in the area, so you have a network to keep you up to date on the latest industry news.
For example, a labor shortage has struck foodservice lately. A series of COVID-related factors has made staying on unemployment more appealing than returning to what’s often a low-paying, stressful workplace. Offering healthcare, PTO and overtime can entice them to come back this summer.
Hiring in Restaurant Recovery
Depending on your particular situation, you may want to hire back workers you lost in the beginning of the pandemic. Alternatively, you can build toward a new, new normal by recruiting from scratch. Regardless of what you choose, workforce management won’t look the same on this side of COVID-19. How will you ensure safe inter-staff communication? What safety protocols are you enacting for their benefit? Will shifts stay together from day to day to reduce the potential for spreading disease? These are all things that employees want to know before joining. It clues them in that you’re paying attention to their needs.
Nondiscrimination policies and the general well-being of staff matters to customers more than ever, so focus on that especially as you create a good company culture. A safe and inclusive workplace strengthens inter-staff relationships so they can work more effectively together and lean on each other when they’re stressed. Content staff sticks around longer, which especially matters given the labor shortage affecting the market. Create effective job postings to recruit the best talent for your team.
Safe and Effective Workforce Management
When you upgrade your restaurant technology, you can swiftly make schedules, do accounting and run payroll. eatOS Point of Sale has all of these features, as well as additional workforce management capabilities like:
clocking in and out from the app
geo-fencing with GPS to restrict timecard fraud
employee profiles that simplify setting permissions and time-off allowances
API integrations that auto-populate payroll data, and
time tracking alerts that notify management when someone forgets to take a break or clock out
Automating these tasks results in lower labor expenses. Combine this with cost-efficient technology like Self-Service Kiosks, which can help reduce the strain of this labor shortage as well.
Photo courtesy of eatOS
As restaurant recovery progresses, honesty and understanding will remain the biggest factors toward productive workforce management. Every business is different, but any business would benefit from a smarter Point of Sale. eatOS offers an all-in-one cloud-based eco-system exclusively for restaurants. From Point of Sale to Contactless Ordering, Pay & Order at Table, Kitchen Display System, Customer Facing Display, Online Ordering APP / Website and Workforce Management there is everything to help a restaurant succeed no matter the size. Click Here to Schedule a demo to learn more about how your restaurant can make a smooth transition into the world of restaurant technology made simple.
