Making Work Schedules Faster Saves Managers Time, and Improves Business Profits

Managers are routinely asked to create efficient schedules for their business on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. Accurately scheduling the work force several weeks in advance provides employees with a defined work schedule and allows managers to estimate upcoming expenses (payroll is often the largest expense in restaurant, hospitality, and other food-service industries). During the process of preparing an accurate schedule, managers will check employee availability, review request logs, consider federal/state/local and corporate regulations, update employee work preferences, review employee capabilities and training, make overtime considerations, ensure minimum work hours all while maintaining budgets and other business requirements. The entire schedule process commonly occupies a manager for 10% of every week, costing the business at least several hundred dollars each week!

Example: A restaurant that employs forty non-management staff may have two assistant managers (a front-of-house manager and a back-of-house or kitchen manager), and a general manager. Non-management staff may make between $3 and $12 per hour, while managers may be salaried between $40,000 and $60,000.

One manager spending 3 hours per week on the schedule will cost the business more than $4,000 per year! Now imagine that same store is a concept with one-hundred locations - that's almost half-amillion dollars ($500,000) in wasted manager time building labor schedules annually!

In addition to creating the schedule, managers often change the schedule on a daily basis. Employees may become available (and want more shifts), suddenly be unavailable (illness or termination) and not able to work, or forget when they need to be at work.

Shift swapping is also common in many industries and requires a manager to spend time on each trade - employees give up shifts that were assigned to them originally, or pick up shifts that others cannot work. A shift or request log may be used for employee initiated shift trades. Managers cannot monitor theft, interact with customers, train employees, or perform quality control at the business if they are in the back-office working on a labor schedule.

Example: A large table service restaurant has three managers, each making an average of $70,000 per year. Additionally, the business has more than one-hundred (100) non-management staff, including cooks, servers, and bartenders. On average six employees (6% of the non-management staff) call in to check their schedule or swap shifts on a daily basis, using a total of 30 minutes per day (5 minutes per call). The location is open 300 days per year, costing the business more than $3,000 per year in schedule change costs. It may take another 6 hours per week to schedule all of the staff - more than $10,500 per year in direct scheduling costs! To ensure that management staff time is spent appropriately, use technology tools to perform tasks that can be done by computers.

Many online software tools can improve staff retention, and decrease the amount of time that building work schedules consumes.

Improving labor management should be an ongoing effort in your business that results in happier staff members, better customer satisfaction, and higher profits for your company.


TimeForge is a leading provider of powerful and simple-to-use staff scheduling and online labor management software for the restaurant and retail industries. TimeForge software is used by restaurant owners and operators around the globe to increase profits, reduce turnover, and improve retention. Read more about TimeForge and labor scheduling software
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