6 Scheduling Strategies That Will Lower Your Turnover Rate

The Vicious Cycle

The cycle most restaurants go through involves recruiting an employee, hiring, training, and then losing that employee.

With most employees, this process is completed within a year of the employee being recruited for the job either from termination or leaving to pursue another job.

If you own or manage a restaurant, it's very likely that you've seen this process at work, possibly quite a few times. You've been at the helm of such a situation and most likely know the headaches that come with it. But do you also know the cost?

A CAP study, that took place between 1992 and 2007, found that the cost of turnover is pretty similar for all jobs, excluding the extremely high paying ones. The cost to replace an employee comes at around 20% of that employee's salary for most jobs.

We can all agree that higher monetary compensation will always motivate employees to stay for a longer time. But is that really a sustainable strategy? How long can you keep that up?

After a period of time, your employees will be back to being unsatisfied for one reason or another. You need to use a different approach to increasing employee satisfaction.

Maintain Seasonal Staff Relationships

The summer period is usually when restaurants have more work and hire more staff. But these workers usually aren't here to stay they're most likely students or will be at the start of the school season. If you're looking to keep these workers for as long as possible you should treat them as normal employees.

Seasonal staff will usually take a back of house job, because of their inexperience working as a waiter. But in order to increase the chance of them staying, you should still train them as if they were staying long-term.

Ask them to check on guests seeing happy faces and knowing they had a part in making that customers can be very rewarding.

Inspire Employee Commitment

Engaging employees with their job is the key to reducing the turnover rate. It's when an employee sincerely loves the job to the point when they're committed to improving themselves in order to be more successful in their job.

But here's the thing employee engagement directly reflects manager engagement. If managers aren't passionate about their job, they can't transfer that satisfaction and enthusiasm to the people they recruit.

Making your job easier by using various tools such as an hourly schedule planner, and POS software can easily make you more engaged in your job. That attitude is infectious, and your employees will quickly pick up on that and share the same sentiment.

Make It Effective & Efficient

Just scheduling to get your employees to work will get you nowhere, you need to pay attention to detail and plan out your schedules so they fit both your business needs and the employees' personal needs.

By satisfying employees' personal needs, you can make sure to increase their commitment and create a better manager-employee bond filled with trust and respect going both ways.

Some people love paying attention to details, while others just focus on getting the job done without worrying too much.

Whether you're detail-oriented or not, in order to truly figure out the resources needed to run the restaurant, you need to pay attention to details and that includes scheduling.

To make the best scheduling decisions, you need to take into account employee

• Availability
• Other life obligations
• Day off requests

Create Schedule in Advance

In order to provide good conditions for your employees, you must schedule ahead of time. This means scheduling at least two weeks in advance, but in most cases, a month in advance is also beneficial.

This gives your employees more time to organize their life around the work schedule and not have to do it the other way around.

Your employees will be very thankful for implementing this scheduling strategy, as it makes their life much more stable and introduces much more flexibility in their lives.

On top of that, as a manager, you have much more time to adjust the schedule if issues arise with some employees. Scheduling problems such as no-shows and last-minute calls to an employee to come to work will be a thing of the past.

If you feel like this might be hard to accomplish, try using an hourly schedule planner application. It can basically create your schedule for you, even ahead of schedule.

Implementing Scheduling Software

Stone-age scheduling methods like pen and paper aren't viable anymore, and will constantly create problems for you. Even solutions like Excel aren't making your job any easier.

Instead, aim to implement an hourly schedule planner into your workplace dedicated software built with the sole purpose of creating better schedules for your team, while also requiring minimal human intervention.

It provides more than just scheduling. Using the apps for both Android and IOS, your employees can quickly communicate with each other and with the managers. This makes it easy to request availability reports and verifies which shifts your employees want to work.

There is also a chat history feature, so you can later come back to the conversation and take notes of the preferred scheduling request that was discussed in the chat.

Spend Less Time Scheduling

Ranging from best to worst, there are quite a few scheduling methods most of them provide you with a challenge when creating the schedule. This, in turn, makes the process more time-consuming and you have less time to invest in more important tasks, such as tending to customers.

But by using an hourly schedule planner, you can drastically decrease the time you need to create the schedule.

You'll have more time to spend on team-building and strengthening bonds with your team, making sure all the tasks are completed in a timely manner.

Improve Employee Satisfaction

Hopefully, with these scheduling strategies, you can greatly improve employee performance and satisfaction.

It's definitely a necessary change, especially with Generation Z applying for jobs now. With every new generation, come new employee needs and many different lifestyles.

And of course, by improving employee satisfaction, you'll decrease the turnover rate and increase customer satisfaction all things that lead to a higher profit for the restaurant.