A Little Bit of Technology Can Make a Big Difference To Your Business

Every business owner knows their employees are their biggest asset and a well-staffed restaurant can make or break the customer experience. A skeleton crew in the kitchen or on the restaurant floor can result in poor service, long waits for food and drink and a public sense of disorganisation. This could result in customers not returning to your restaurant and not recommending it to friends and family; a disaster in a very competitive market. With experts predicting that 35% of the global workforce will be made up by Millennials by 2020, now is definitely the time for food business owners to find ways to adapt employee management techniques in order to attract and retain staff.

There should be three aims when allocating staff for shifts:

1: Ensure you have the correct distribution of skills and qualities on each shift. 
2: Understand staff availability and maintain a balance of fairness when distributing quiet or busy periods
3: Make sure your employees are informed of their allocated shifts. 

It’s not easy and can be very time consuming.

A white-board or wall-planner are fine as a quick fix, but with these you are relying on your employees noting down their shifts accurately when they are on the premises. What if they write it down wrong, forget to check the chart or lose the piece of paper? When you have a fully booked restaurant the last thing you need is an employee failing to turn up and leaving you sort-staffed, putting additional pressure on the staff that are at work and affecting your customer experience.

This is where introducing technology can help your business thrive by giving you a more efficient system with far less room for error. If you’re not convinced it's worth the effort or cost of changing your process, read on, we will change your minds!

By using an online time and attendance package, employees can access their shift pattern from their phones or computers at any time and they can update their availability with ease. This type of system can synchronise with personal calendars, removing the risk of errors when logging shifts in diaries. With 26% of Millennials working 2 or more jobs, easy access to schedules and calendars syncing is surly an extremely useful tool to help ensure employees turn up at the right place of work on the right day and at the right time.

NEXT READ: 8 Restaurant Technologies That Will Improve Business