What’s worse? Not having enough employees during a rush, or having too much personnel standing around with nothing to do? The truth is, both scenarios cost restaurants too much money for obvious reasons. Keeping track of employees seems straightforward, but when you have to manage an untold number of other responsibilities, your staffing strategy can sometimes fall by the wayside.
To optimize staffing, you might want to consider using a scheduling software solution, automatically calculating your labor cost percentage, and consistently tracking your employees.
Automating your staffing
Without the right tech tools, you’re operating a restaurant purely on instinct and unreliable manual calculations. It’s true that many low-tech businesses have managed to be a success, but in 2018, where the stakes are higher than ever before, losing even a small percentage of profit due to inefficient staffing could potentially mean the end of a business. Restaurateurs can mitigate this risk with an easy-to-use scheduling software.
MYR recently partnered with 7shifts to empower quick-service and takeaway restaurants with sales performance insights to make efficient, more profitable labor decisions. The seamless integration combines real-time sales data from MYR with the scheduling and labor management tools in 7shifts without the need for manual uploads or spreadsheets. Restaurateurs that use 7shifts or MYR together in their operation can leverage this new integration in order to:
- Forecast future sales with 95% accuracy: Using 7shifts proprietary forecasting algorithm, restaurants can accurately forecast their future sales using historical data from their MYR POS.
- Eliminate over and understaffing: Plot data from your MYR POS directly in your 7shifts staff schedule to create labor-perfect, optimal schedules that respect your staff’s availability.
- Reduce labor costs by up to 3% of total sales: View your sales data in real-time to check variance and make profitable business decisions that reduce costs and elevate restaurant profitability.
Using this real-time data is invaluable for restaurateurs to be able to stay in control of payroll costs, and would be nearly impossible to gather without a system like 7shifts.
Labor cost percentage
Your labor cost percentage is one of the most important restaurant metrics to keep track of on a daily basis. This is because labor is often the highest restaurant cost after rent (and sometimes it costs more than rent).
Limited-service or fast-casual restaurants and cafes typically try to stay within the industry-average target of 25% to 30% for payroll costs. Keep in mind that total labor costs include:
- Salaried employee wages
- Hourly employee wages
- Bonuses
- Overtime
- Payroll Taxes
- Health care
- Sick and vacation days
Depending on how your staff is structured (salaried or hourly) you can manually calculate your percentage of labor cost using data from your POS. Fortunately, with a system like 7shifts, the work is done for you and provided to you in real-time.
Want to know how much money you can save by using a scheduling software instead of managing schedules and working out figures by hand? Check out this restaurant labor cost savings calculator.
Tracking staff
It’s important to take note of how efficiently your staff works given various tasks, as well as how quickly they learn to master certain activities. This is because training new staff comes with a cost, and you’ll want to minimize turnover to avoid those new employee costs. Making sure your scheduling is smooth and efficient is just one of the many ways management can ensure employee satisfaction.
Another way to increase efficiency is by observing your employees to understand their strengths and shortcomings. Get to know your team, and you’ll be able to optimize your division of labor by assigning the right roles and tasks to the right employees.
Finally, make sure you and your staff are tracking their hours accurately. You can save money by ensuring your staff clock in and out consistently. Systems like 7shifts have features that serve as an easy-to-use, secure, time-clocking punch pad for your employees.
Don’t lose money because your scheduling is all out of whack! MYR users can streamline their staffing – see here to learn more about 7shifts and MYR.
