Restaurant owners find out that it can be a thankless job. A blend between the hospitality industry and food service, managing a restaurant means high-turnover with employees, rising food costs, and an incredibly slim profit margin. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
So it stands to reason that if there exists any type of software package out there that can help you manage aspects of your restaurant, particularly in relation to your workforce, it might just be something worth trying out.
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What is Workforce Planning Software?
Workforce planning software is part of the overarching yet specialized category of restaurant management software that assists managers and owners by streamlining a variety of tasks from the difficult to the mundane and tedious.
For instance, a lot of this software will deal in helping you to manage your inventory. You can keep much better track of food freshness, overall food costs, and various vendors, so that you can always control your costs and quality in a streamlined system that flows.
Though the workforce planning option is much more about how you’re handling your employees. Even if you have the best food and the best prices, bad service can cripple your business. This is not any new news to restaurant managers, of course, but it’s important to really cement the potential windfall of such a software management system utilized in your establishment.
Benefits Restaurant Owners Gain Through the Use of Software
To help you better understand everything the right workforce planning software can do for your restaurant, let us communicate its effectiveness through the benefits you will experience by using such a software package. Here are some of the top benefits.
- Finding Employees: A high turnover business is so high turnover in part because of low-skilled employees. This isn’t any sort of political or moral or societal statement; it is simply a fact. So finding better employees is a must to keep them on longer and to provide a better quality of work and service. This is an area where workforce planning software can help you mightily by weeding through applicants and helping you find the best qualified people for a position.
- Training Employees: The task of training employees can be quiet tedious and something that you hope to be able to avoid, though never can. Even when hiring people with supposed experience in the industry, there always seems to be a need for training. You can use this sort of software package to streamline the process of training your employees to better service your customers, which is a boon for your managing as it allows you to focus the bulk of your time elsewhere.
- Schedule Shifts: Anyone who has ever had to sit down with a pen, paper, a calculator and a bottle of Wite-Out knows all too well the time-consuming nature of scheduling employees’ shifts. This one asked off, that one wants to leave early, these two are trading shifts, and on it goes. With scheduling software, the program does the bulk of the work for you and ensures that the times all work out so you have no overlap or unattended gaps. When employees do present those changes, it can be rectified easily with some quick data entry.
- Paying Employees: As mentioned above with the scheduling, keeping track of employee hours can be hard. For some reason, the typical nine-to-five forty-hour work week is a rarity with restaurant employees. There’s always some odd hour sheets to go over. The software keeps track of all of this, start to finish, with every employee, so there is no need to manually calculate the hours of each individual employee. As long as you’re maintaining accurate data inside of the system, it will do its job.
- A Great Database: Overall, the right workforce management system just helps you to create a fantastic database that will assist you in managing employees. From hiring and training to paying and releasing, there’s so much this software accomplishes. It even deals in HR matters and allows you to catalog aspects of employee interactions such as behavior (good or bad), growth, and much more.
Tips to Help You Choose
Now that you know what this software can do, let’s go over a few tips to help you choose the right package for your business. Here are a few things you’re looking for in a high-quality workforce management software package.
- Affordability in its initial purchase
- High-quality software that offers support
- Multi-faceted software that allows you to accomplish many tasks
- Easy to use, clean interface software that you can flow into
- Accurate software that can do proper calculations
- Scheduling proficiency, as this will be needed
- Highly rated software that has worked for other businesses
Every restaurant can benefit greatly from the right workforce management software package. Just make sure you’re selecting yours wisely, by ensuring it meets all of your needs.