Why Restaurant Staffing Plans Matter
All restaurant owners and managers know the struggle of finding good people to staff the business. Turnover rates are high in this industry, and it seems that just when you have the staff dialed in perfectly, some of your best people decide to move on.
A great staffing plan can help you ride out those inevitable ups and downs. With a logical and detailed plan, you can overcome unexpected departures or absences and stay on track to provide customers with an outstanding experience.
A Better Customer Experience
Have you ever had it happen where a customer walks into the restaurant and no one is there to greet them? No business is perfect, of course, but that’s never a good look – and some people will just turn around and walk right back out.
The staff is the face of your restaurant and you need a plan that will make sure the right people on your team are always in the right place.
Reduced Labor Costs
The two major expenses for every restaurant are labor and the cost of goods sold. Turning a profit at the end of the month comes down to not only keeping the restaurant as busy as possible but also keeping these two expense items under control.
A good staffing plan addresses the labor cost piece of the puzzle nicely. When your plan is dialed in, you can avoid being overstaffed when the restaurant is quiet, while still making sure to have plenty of people on hand when the tables are packed.
Steps to Create an Effective Staffing Plan
Don’t be intimidated by the task of building a staffing plan for your restaurant. It might sound like a lot of work, but it’s actually pretty simple. With these three steps done, you’ll be well on your way.
Utilize Historical Data
The best way to know when your restaurant needs to be fully staffed – and when you can have fewer people on hand – is by looking at past data. Evaluate your sales figures for various time periods, including days of the week and times of the year – and you’ll quickly find some patterns that you can use to make solid decisions.
Identify the Key Roles
What roles do you need to fill in your restaurant whenever you are open for business? This will vary depending on the type of establishment you run, but common requirements are servers, cooks, and dishwashers, among others. Figure out how many people you need in each of those roles when the restaurant is busy, as well as when it is slower.
Use Technology to Build a Schedule
There are great pieces of scheduling software available to the restaurant industry. The best tools not only enable you to make a schedule, but also allow for swapping shifts between workers, time off requests, and more.
Hiring the Right Employees
Ah, the million-dollar question – how do you find the right people to staff your restaurant? We can’t claim to have a magic potion to solve all of your troubles in this area, but these two points are key.
Pick the Right Trait
The restaurant industry is unlike any other, and it takes a certain type of person to succeed in this space. Specific technical skills don’t tend to apply to many positions in the restaurant as much as soft skills like a positive attitude, outgoing personality, and calm demeanor. If you find a person with the right traits and a good work ethic to match, don’t let them pass by.
Lean on Referrals
One great way to expand your roster of quality employees is to ask your current employees if they know anyone looking for work. The people already on your team know what the work requires, and they will be putting their reputation on the line – so they’ll usually just nominate people who are up to the challenge. You might even offer some type of incentive to encourage as many referrals as possible.
Monitoring and Optimizing Your Plan
Doing the groundwork of tracking the history of your restaurant to see when it’s busy and when it isn’t, and then building a schedule to match, is a great starting point. Just doing that is going to put you ahead of many other businesses and you should be able to cut out much of the inefficiency in your scheduling.
As you already know, however, the job of scheduling is never done. Every week – and every shift – brings new challenges to encounter and overcome. Staying on top of it over time is the only way to make sure things don’t slide back into a bad place.
Openly Accept Feedback
The people working for you offer the best insight into how things are going. Be open to their feedback and actively seek out their input. What do they think is working about the staffing plan, and what could be better? These choices are ultimately yours to make, but getting input from the front lines is extremely useful.
Track Important Metrics
Over time, you can use data to analyze your staffing scheduling and how it is doing. Have costs gone down since you started improving your staffing plan? Are you able to operate with a smaller staff at certain times without harming the customer experience? Only through monitoring will you know for certain that you are on the right track.
Building a Great Staff Can Build a Great Restaurant
The value of quality staff in a restaurant can’t be overstated. We know you’ve already put in a ton of time and effort to make your business what it is today, and fine-tuning details like your staffing plan can unlock access to an even higher level of performance.
Supporting your employees with the tools they need to be successful can not only boost their performance, but it can encourage them to stick around for the long run. When you need to provide training opportunities to your team to make sure they are compliant with state laws and able to deliver a good experience to every customer, work with Responsible Training. Our user-friendly courses are convenient, affordable, and ANSI-accredited. Get started today!.
Compliance for Your Whole Team
Work with Responsible Training to make sure everyone on your staff can easily stay compliant with industry training requirements.