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Shift Savvy: Why Restaurants Should Embrace Technology for Human Resources
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Shift Savvy: Why Restaurants Should Embrace Technology for Human Resources

Why Restaurants Should Embrace Technology for Human Resources

Running a restaurant is not for the faint-hearted. Along with serving good quality food, keeping customers happy and promoting your business, it’s also necessary to keep track of your staff in terms of when and where they work, as well as their productivity and wellbeing at work. When competition is high, it’s important to ensure you keep a check on your HR practices and have a strategy in place for when things don’t quite go to plan.

Imagine if you didn’t have to spend valuable time making sure you have enough staff available for each shift. What if you used new tech to support you with shift-scheduling, hiring, and reservations? Fortunately, there is technology available that can help you with all this, and many restaurants are already utilising them to grow their business. Here are the top reasons why.

Maximise your time

Think of the time you will save when you say goodbye to the awkward process of using paper, phone calls, and text messages to schedule shifts. Invest in dedicated restaurant rota software to take that burden from you. These solutions have been shown to help managers spend up to 80% less time scheduling their staff. These handy tools are just what you need to make your restaurant more efficient.

With all that time freed up, you could be focusing more of your energy and resources on growing your business instead. Rather than worrying over a shortage of kitchen staff, you could be executing marketing campaigns or doing product development. Instead of taking calls from employees to check and swap their shifts, you could be working on reviewing your business costs and finding cheaper, better suppliers to improve profits. Use the time not to get by, but to grow.

Streamline hiring

Hiring new colleagues can be the most cost-intensive exercise of running a business. The average estimated cost per new employee is £3,000! Cut this cost by investing in a hiring and recruitment tool that seamlessly integrates with your employee schedule.

Recruitment software can support you with applicant tracking, CV parsing, automated job board posting, and customised company careers pages. If you’re looking to perfect your hiring process, this could be priceless.

Improve staff attendance

At busy times of the year, it is important to keep your employees engaged enough to turn up for work. This is a tough time of year to do so—71% of hospitality managers have noticed a rise in absences over the holidays.

Choose a restaurant shift scheduling tool that lets your employees select the shifts they would like, submit annual leave requests and get shift reminders well in advance of upcoming shifts. When staff are in control of their hours and their schedule, they are more likely to not only turn up for work on time but be more productive during the time they are at work.

Take reservations with ease

How much time do you and your employees spend on the phone taking bookings? You could drastically reduce this time by introducing an online table reservation system. By utilising this technology, you’ll find you and your employees spend less time on the phone and more time tending to the customers you already have.

An added benefit is the accuracy of automation. It’s sometimes not easy to take a phone call in a busy, noisy restaurant, and mistakes can happen. When using an online booking system, there’s no room for human error unless the customer makes a mistake. Say goodbye to your worst nightmare: double bookings!

Keep your staff happy

Did you know that employee turnover is 174% more likely without real-time scheduling capabilities? Sometimes your employees want to make plans around their shifts, and they would prefer not to take a holiday. By looking at previous sales records, you can work out when your restaurant is usually busy and when it’s quieter. Use this data to estimate how many people you need on any given day and give those that need it a well-earned rest.

This is helpful for forward planning and means your employees needn’t waste valuable annual leave when they don’t need to. And when your staff are happy, they will be enthusiastic about their job and business will thrive.

Speed up service

Keeping track of orders is arguably the most important part of running a restaurant. Without it, your customers could be faced with long waiting times or even missing meals. If your staff often struggle to follow the stream of orders coming in, consider purchasing or updating your order management software.

If you are looking for something that makes service faster, then look no further than a table-side ordering system. It may seem like you are only saving the seconds it takes for the waiting staff to take the order to the kitchen, but if staff are stopped by other customers on the way, it could lead to delays on food being prepared. When the waiting staff send the order to the kitchen electronically straight from the table, there’s no possibility of a delay.

Drive-thru technology has been around for years, but check out advanced solutions at RSS that keep customer wait times to a minimum.

It’s a no-brainer

When investing in a little technology goes such a long way, you have to ask yourself: why not? The world today is increasingly digital, and the restaurant industry is no exception. Try not to fall behind while the competition gets ahead!

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