Ultimate Guide to Choosing an Industry Weekly Schedule Template

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Choosing a Weekly Schedule Template for the Food & Restaurant Industry

Weekly schedule templates help overcome a plethora of issues that you encounter while managing your workforce. With technology at your fingertips, you can manage your resources in an efficient and organized manner. This is extremely essential in the food and restaurant industry, which employs close to 10% of the employable resources in the US. Also, the high attrition rate in this industry makes it inevitable to rely on tools that offer quick and hassle-free solutions. So, with a comprehensive yet flexible employee scheduling tool, you are going to be in a better position to manage the day to day affairs.

What is a weekly schedule template?

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Weekly schedule templates are tools that enable you to manage your resources, without spending hours pounding away at the keyboard. A few decades ago, businesses did this manually on registers and in planners, and then gradually moved on to use the computer, that later evolved into the cloud.


Since then, more customizable, automated and efficacious tools have been developed, which make managing employee schedules as simple as can be. So if you've been creating your own custom-made weekly schedule templates in excel or in a Word file, then emailing them to your employees, you've been living in the dark ages.


It's time to explore more viable options like the weekly schedule applications provided by Zip Schedules. Without this tool, you would be missing out on real-time communication with your employees, as well as taking time away from interacting with your customers.

Essentials of an Ideal Weekly Schedule Template

Productive and motivated employees can do wonders for your business, and happy employees are indeed valuable assets. However, as a business owner, you could be holding them back from realizing their full potential. To ensure that they deliver their very best version of themselves, you need to manage your resources effectively, without causing the dreadful employee burnout. Now that is definitely not going to be possible without a robust system set in place to avoid errors, such as over-scheduling and under-scheduling.


The viable solution- a handy weekly schedule template one that is intuitive and keeps track of your scheduling pattern by pinpointing underutilized resources. This is a feature that Excel templates do not have the ability to produce. So if you are ready to replace such an archaic practice with a more innovative solution, then follow these best practices-

1. Make Scheduling Easier
If you are caught up in the vicious cycle of rolling out new schedules on a weekly basis, which can consist of constant rescheduling and last-minute coverage changes, then it's time to break free. Managing schedules should not be a nightmare. In fact, it should be pretty simple, considering this entire process could be completed in the palm of your hand within a matter of minutes.


With the right weekly schedule template set in place, and on a tech-savvy platform, you could create a schedule once from your mobile device, save it, and then recycle that schedule to carry on into the coming weeks. Because the schedule is accessible by phone or desktop, you can make alterations from anywhere at anytime if need be.


By utilizing this feature, you not only minimize your workload but also do away with the last-minute phone calls to cover a shift, emails to confirm availability every week and other various complications that can arise when it comes to scheduling shifts.


2. Meet Industry-Specific Needs
Every industry requires specific needs to allow the business to run more smoothly. Customizable tools allow businesses to meet those needs. When selecting a weekly schedule template for your business, make sure that it meets your industry's demands. For example, in the food and restaurant industry, it is imperative to have a Scheduler that offers real-time solutions based on current business expectations.


3. Make Schedules Easily Accessible
Sending out weekly schedule templates to your employees via email may not work as well in the food and restaurant industry, as it would in the IT industry. You can't expect your employees to download that template onto a computer, make changes in the document, sign off on it, and then send it back to you. Also, in the restaurant industry, you need to manage shifts for employees with more limited availability. Unlike the IT industry, your staff may not check their emails on a regular basis. However in today's day and age, everyone has a smartphone, allowing them to access their weekly schedule anytime. Making a schedule conveniently available to employees ensures shift accountability.


4. Allow for Accurate Tracking
When you are scheduling your employees for multiple shifts, it isn't easy to keep track of those who are being over-scheduled or of the ones that you have under-utilized. Attempting to personally track these stats is too time-consuming, so why not utilize a more accurate solution in an automated system. Such tools is precisely what Zip Schedules offers.

Benefits of Creating a Strong Weekly Schedule Template

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The food and restaurant industry is one of the most dynamic and challenging places to work in. It has the highest attrition rate, in the US. While Flippy, the Robot is simplifying flipping burgers, there are more pressing matters that need to be tackled in this industry. Because most restaurants remain open for at least eighteen hours per day, scheduling shifts can be quite challenging.


Improper allocation of resources can easily disrupt the day-to-day operations of your business. To overcome the possibility of such an unpleasant scenario, you need to make use of the right weekly employee schedule template. Let us now discuss a number of key benefits that applying a strong weekly schedule template in the restaurant industry can bring, such as-


1. Connects Everyone
Imagine a tool that can be accessed by you and all of your employees, allowing everyone to communicate about work-related matters without having to invest in additional resources. By bringing you the most convenient and easy to use mobile applications, which is compatible with all operating systems, this can be done. Staying connected allows for everyone to be on the same page and will improve communication.


2. Enables Real-Time Communication
The food and restaurant industry requires real-time communication because multiple resources must work in unison in order to achieve a common goal. If one employee cannot make their shift, and the shift manager fails to find a timely replacement, then the entire chain of operations becomes disrupted.


By enabling real-time communication, you overcome this potential problem, as you can quickly communicate with all co-workers at once, in real time, which will keep the business running at its best, despite all the odds. Employees also have the ability communicate with each other to personally find their replacement.


3. Possesses Prompt Allocation of Resources
In the food and restaurant industry, there are many positions that keep the business functioning, and shifts need to created for each of those roles, which can further complicate scheduling. This includes professionals involved in housekeeping, cooking, purchasing, security, delivery and many more.


This can call for a more systemized process for a prompt allocation of employees. Zip Schedules facilitates this by minimizing the possibility of over-scheduling and under-scheduling of employees with flawless labor forecasting. By leveraging such intuitive technology of this weekly scheduler, you cannot go wrong.


4. Maximizes Profits
The way things work in the restaurant world is unlike most other businesses, like remaining open during late hours, weekends and holidays which is precisely why restaurant employees remain extremely busy. Since this sector remains open all through the week, managing shifts can be the game-changer. What you need is a specialized tool that is fully capable of detecting under-utilized resources. Once you do that, you will then make better business decisions and maximize your profits because a well-staffed business provides exceptional service and creates returning customers.

Drawbacks of Traditional Weekly Schedule Templates

The choice of a weekly schedule template is critical for the smooth functioning of a restaurant. However, picking a random scheduler could be an expensive blunder, which could lead to further mismanagement. So you need to specifically look for one that solves all the complexities involved in scheduling shifts for a business that runs all through the week. Unless you have the right system in place, planning weekly days off for every employee and their rotation can become a mess. To ensure that you have the most efficacious system in place, you must avoid certain elements.

Drawbacks of Excel and PDF Templates

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Microsoft Excel has long since been a favorite weekly schedule management tool, but it is undeniably complex and annoying to manage spreadsheets. Not to mention that it is less interactive, as the only way to let your employees update their availability is through in-person request, emails, or phone calls, which takes up a lot of time and usually requires hiring a shift manager to handle this tedious process, adding to your overall costs.


Moreover, when you have a better alternative like Zip Schedules at your disposal, you do not need to go through this strenuous process. Instead, let your employees access their weekly schedules and personally update their availability hands-on.


This helps prevent the annoying and stressful last-minute calls and emails, which you may have to otherwise, make in order to find a replacement. Instead, you can easily see who is available and find replacements with the click of a button. As a result, you end up saving money and resources and have established a more efficient and interactive system.


If you swear by the power of emailing non-editable weekly schedule templates in PDF form, then think again. PDF files do not come cheap, and your employees may not have access to it, baring the burden on you to deal with the emails and phone calls for schedule revision requests.


If you've been using an archaic weekly schedule template in PDF or Excel form, then it's time to rid of it and incorporate a more interactive and efficient system. When taking into account, that unlike most other business, the restaurant industry's demands never sleep and does not run on a 5-day weekly schedule. The industry has a unique set of requirements, and those can only be met with interactive and innovative software, like that offered by Zip Schedules.

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