Labor Management. NOW Simple.

Managing in a footwear retail environment can require an in-depth knowledge of consumer behavior, an up-to-the minute knowledge of fashion trends, merchandising brilliance, the peace-keeping skills of Ghandi, intelligent purchasing, and a watchdog-like attention to inventory control. And tedious hours in the backroom, building complex employee schedules, juggling multiple employees, their skill sets and availability, labor laws, meal breaks, PTO… and then doing it again when someone asks for unexpected time off or a shift swap.

Not to mention communicating the schedule (and any updates employee meetings or trainings and shift changes) to all the employees; monitoring employee attendance (not just scrambling to address the missed shift when someone says the didn’t get the schedule update, but the early clock ins or buddy time clock punching, as well); trying to stay abreast of daily sales or important in-store occurrences; and accurately forecasting future labor needs and costs.

Deft retail employee scheduling and attendance monitoring isn’t easy. But with the right tools, you can accomplish it in minutes and spend your time more productively in the front of the store – or even off-site.

Timeforge allows shoe retailers to cut employee scheduling and attendance monitoring time from hours to minutes (literally). In challenging economic times, the ability to manage schedules at one or many locations, schedule those with stronger skills in the high volume time slots, and monitor and forecast your labor costs makes Timeforge not just a time-saver but a money saver. In fact, TimeForge can increase retail profits by 3-5%.

Add in the ability to notify employees of upcoming schedules and schedule changes by email or text message (reducing late or absent employees), to integrate simply with POS or payroll systems, and the ability to focus your energies on the urgent, but more creative, duties facing a retail manager on any given day (rather than mind-numbing scheduling minutia), you’ll probably find that the time saved in the first week alone pays for the investment.

With TimeForge, Shoe Retailers Can …

• Create complicated, or simple, employee schedules in seconds.
• Notify employees of schedules, schedule change, meetings or training by text message or email – eliminating employee confusion and missed shifts
• Review daily sales information, approve shift swaps, review employee requests for time off, and monitor employees on the clock either on site or remotely, through the TimeForge website, via a Smartphone (such as a Blackberry or iPhone), and even through a Facebook account.
• Stop employees from clocking in before the shift starts or after the shift ends, or punching in friends.
• Export payroll to many popular payroll providers with a single click.
• Monitor labor costs in real-time, using TimeForge’s real time attendance monitoring system.
• Increase store profits by 3-5% with labor reductions and improved employee retention
• And much more…

TimeForge is a complete labor management solution for the footwear and retail businesses, providing one-click seamless access to employee scheduling, time and attendance, and payroll reports. Use the whole TimeForge product suite, or only the parts that your business requires.

Read more about TimeForge Scheduling, TimeForge Attendance, and TimeForge Daily Log.

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In many businesses, employees are perceived as a required evil – payroll is a liability that is necessary to be in business.  Unfortunately, in many service oriented industries (such as retail, food-service, and hospitality industries), this attitude harms the business by increasing turnover, deflating morale, complicating legitimate hiring practices, and increasing employee training costs.  These problems are systemic in many organizations, creating dissension between salaried managers and non-salaried employees and increasing turnover.  Another, better, way to view employees is as assets to the business.

Training Costs Money Too

All new employees, even experienced hires, must be trained appropriately.  Employees should be trained in the corporate vision, customer service, and the details of their specific job.  Duties that each employee is responsible for performing will need to be demonstrated by a competent manager or trainer, and then must be repeated by the newly hired staff member.  Training entry-level workers can often take more than a week of management time, and properly training salaried managers may occupy several months.  In addition to the management time utilized training employees, new hires must be paid during their training.  Make sure that training is streamlined and hiring practices are refined to reduce the cost associated with hiring.  Consider Internet based tools to assist staff training, where appropriate.

Employees Become Lucrative Assets Over Time

Employees are expected to learn new skills while working, often referred to as “on-the-job training”.  Most work-related skills can be learned on-the-job, including new equipment skills, customer service skills, and business skills.  These new skills are passed to employees through interaction with managers and other employees at the business, and is the foundation of many promotions.  Hourly wage workers can grow into Assistant Managers.  Assistant Managers can climb the ladder to become General Managers.  General Managers become District Managers, or Vice Presidents.  Each employee becomes a trusted asset, and finding a replacement for an employee that leaves the business will always cost more than the direct salary of that employee.  In addition to training costs, there is an obvious and direct cost when employees are absent and customers are not adequately served.

Keep Assets (Employees) in Mind While Scheduling Work

When scheduling employees, managers should remember that employees are assets necessary to help the business grow and profit.  Employees that excel at certain job duties should be scheduled where their talents can improve business profitability.  Employee requests for time off, changes to the work schedule, and holidays should be honored where possible – and the business should establish rules and regulations to facilitate constant communication between employees and managers.

Turnover Is Expensive — Really, Really Expensive

Turnover is not cheap.  Indeed most managers under-estimate its cost and the learning curve of working in a new restaurant.  Approximately 70% of the cost of turnover is the loss of productivity before an employee leaves, as the employee’s attitude toward the business becomes detached and fewer customers are served.  Turnover in most hospitality-related industries (restaurants, bars, clubs, hotels) averages around 100% annually – meaning that a store with 30 employees has hired 30 employees in the last twelve months!  Using a cost of $2,000 per staff member, that is an annual turnover expense of more than $60,000!  Reducing turnover should b e a primary concern for any business.

Internet-based scheduling tools, such as TimeForge, can assist managers when building and maintaining labor schedules.  These tools can allocate labor appropriately for your business, track employee availability and time off, meal and break periods, and alert employees when their scheduling needs are, or are not, met.  Your business will not always be able to cater to your employee’s needs, but constant communication between salaried managers and hourly-wage employees will reduce turnover at your business and preserve the value of your employee assets.  Payroll may be a liability, but employees are business assets.

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Managers and supervisors can approve or deny employee requests for time off, or changes to availability, in bulk from the “Today” screen in TimeForge. To approve or deny these availability requests, users can easily click the “Approve” or “Deny” for each request, and then click on the “Process” button at the bottom of the list of requests.

All employees will receive email notifications of the Approval or Denial, and employees can always check the status of their availability requests by logging into their own account on TimeForge.com

How long does it take to make your employee labor schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your retail business, restaurant, bar, club, or hotel?

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Scheduling minors and senior citizens couldn’t be easier! In many locations, your staff members who are under a legal age (minors) must be scheduled according to specific legal regulations. Commonly, these labor rules require minors to work on specific days (for example, only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday), fewer than 1 shift per day (no doubles), or less than a certain number of hours per week.

TimeForge makes compliance with these corporate, local, state, and national regulations easy! You and your Human Resources department can easy build age-specific rules, specifying when employees can, or cannot, work.

Some of the rules that can be specified include:

• Minimum or maximum scheduled hours per week, such as “Maximum of 40 hours per week”
• Minimum or maximum scheduled shifts per week, such as “No fewer than 2 shifts per week”
• Minimum or maximum scheduled shifts per day, such as “No doubles”

Additionally, age rules include availability requests that can be specified on a calendar, just like TimeForge employee requests!

To access the Age Rules, login to TimeForge, and then choose the “Employees” tab, and then click on “Age Rules”.

Hot Tip: Age Rules can be used to define corporate-wide standards for scheduling employees. For example, you can define age rules for minors you employee, another age rule for employees aged 18 – 65, and a final age rule for senior citizens.

Hot Tip Two: Within TimeForge, you can have as many age rules as you would like. For example, the rules for scheduling minors who are 14 – 15 may be different than the rules for scheduling 16 – 17 year old minors. In this case, TimeForge will allow you to define two separate groups of age rules to schedule your employees. You can have as many groups as you would like!

How long does it take to make your employee labor schedule? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your retail business, restaurant, bar, club, or hotel?

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As we discussed before, RunningRestaurants.com recently featured TimeForge.com in their People & Staffing section. However, RunningRestaurants.com is a member-only site and is brought to you by the minds behind RestaurantReport.com and Sante … so you know it’s worthwhile!

However, because the article is part of a member-only website, it will only be removed from the general public in a few weeks, and you’ll need to be a member to purchase it. We do suggest becoming a member, but in the meantime, the article is re-published below for your convenience:

TimeForge offers a web-based employee scheduling system for restaurants. We spoke with Anthony Presley, the Founder of TimeForge about his business and some of the potential ways it benefits restaurant operators today.

RR: Paper schedules have worked for a long, long time — why web based labor scheduling?

AP: Because paper schedules are difficult and time consuming. Building a paper schedule requires that the manager building the schedule consider many different factors including employee abilities / skills, anticipated sales, individual work habits, food preparation, employee availability, individual work requests, certifications required for handling alcohol, and overall labor costs. If any one of those factors is incorrect, the establishment can lose sales, personnel, or be fined. It’s a tedious and time-consuming task that few operators enjoy doing.

Web based labor scheduling allows managers to input many of the scheduling factors into an easy to manipulate format, and the software remembers – forever – everything that the managers (or employees) input. If “John” asked for Monday off, and the manager agreed, then John is not available to be scheduled on Monday.

RR: What do employees think of the system?

AP: Employees LOVE the system. We recently began entering data for a client in Connecticut, and as part of our data entry, we setup all of his employees to be able to login into TimeForge. Our setup process can take between 2 and 4 days, and by the time the owner was using TimeForge, his employees had already submitted more than 40 requests for time off, had been receiving daily email and text message alerts about their schedules, and told him that it was “Very Cool!”

RR: The notification aspect of your system seems like a neat feature — talk about this a bit.

AP: Notifications keep employees “in the loop” anytime a schedule is created, a request is approved or denied, or a shift swap is approved by management. More specifically, with TimeForge, employees can input their email address and/or their cell phone numbers to allow TimeForge to contact them. Of course, employees can check the status of upcoming schedules, shift swaps, or request / availability changes at any time by logging into the website.

When schedules are published or modified by management, employees are sent an email with the updated schedule. Employees receive schedule emails on a “rolling” basis – meaning that they receive an email every day, which includes that day’s schedule, and the next several days (up to 30) worth of schedules. Additionally, employees can receive text messages before their shift. These messages go straight to their cell phone, and can be setup by the employee to ring up to 24 hours in advance of the beginning of the shift.

The notifications keep employees informed, which makes them happy, which reduces turnover. A win-win for the business!

RR: So, have you seen the system positively effect employee turnover?

AP: Yes, yes we have. Many of our users have seen a 5% – 8% reduction in turnover after using our system. Why? Because requests are tracked, employee schedule preferences are tracked and both requests and preferences appear on the schedules every time. Employees are notified when they need to work. Schedules can be printed, emailed, and sent via text message. Employees stay happy, because they always know what is going on, and don’t have to wait for management to post the schedule on Sunday night to see who works on Monday morning.

RR: If a restaurant operator says “tell me in 15 seconds why your product is a good idea”, how do you respond?

AP: We have a simple pitch…it is designed to be simple, because our software is simple. The response is always: “Can you make a schedule in 30 seconds? Our software can, which means you can be doing something else with your time.” I don’t know many operators, even with only a few employees, who can build a schedule in 30 seconds.

Once the restaurant operators digests the fact that TimeForge can, in fact, build a complete schedule in 30 seconds…then we start talking about employee notifications, shift swapping, overlapping schedule capabilities (kitchen, dining room, patio, catering, etc.), multiple locations, strength/skill level ranking, multiple position tracking, reduction in turnover, etc.

RR: How much time does a typical owner/manger have to spend with the scheduling system on a weekly basis? And how have you seen that differ from what they experience with their existing scheduling system?

AP: Most of our users are able to pick up the basics of the system within minutes. We have several tutorials, as well as more than 100 FAQ questions and embedded help screens to assist our users.

However, once fully proficient with the software, the typical managerial user can expect to spend about 3 – 5 minutes per day with the software. This time is used to print out the daily schedule, review any employee requests that are outstanding, and approve or deny employee shift swaps. Additionally, when it is time to make the schedule, managers can expect to spend another 5 – 10 minutes creating the schedule for a medium-sized restaurant. When they are happy with the schedule, they just click “Post”, and all of the employees on the schedule can see the schedule. That’s it!

Comparatively, scheduling with excel (or by hand) or a POS system requires that the manager first locate the request book, the availability sheets, the notes that were taken outside of either of those documents, a separate sheet for each individual’s labor costs, and they will need to keep track of several other factors in their head (such as employee skill sets, and min/max hours per employee). Once they’re done (a process which could take between 2 and 6 hours per week), they need to make sure the employees are notified. This probably means going into their email system, copying the schedule, and emailing it to their employees. A lot more work, a lot more than can go wrong.

TimeForge.com

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor expenses through effective employee labor management at your business, bar, club, or restaurant.

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Our employee scheduling product, TimeForge, has been featured on RunningRestaurants.com, a members-only sister site of RestaurantReport.com In the interview, I discussed some of the special features in TimeForge, such as the AutoScheduler, employee schedule alerts, employee requests, and setting up availability.

Thanks very much to Jaime Oikle and his staff for featuring our software!

Some of the topics that we covered included:

• Labor scheduling has been done on paper for years … why should a restaurant look at moving to web based employee scheduling?
• Do employees like to use labor scheduling systems like TimeForge?
• What are employee notifications, and do employee alerts help keep staff happy, and reduce turnover?
• Does a web based employee scheduling software positively effect employee turnover?
• In 15 seconds (or less), tell restaurant operators and managers why they should use TimeForge for their scheduling needs.
• How long does it take to learn a powerful labor scheduling system like TimeForge, and how much time do owners/managers spend with your system on a weekly basis to manage the schedules?

Feel free to let us know if you think we forgot something important!

You can read the complete article on RunningRestaurants.com

How long does it take to make your employee schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee labor management at your business, bar, club, grocery, convenience store, or restaurant.

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Do you want to reduce your turnover by at least 5 percent?
Do you want to improve employee satisfaction?
Do you want to build a schedule in just a few minutes?
Do you want to be doing something other than making the labor schedule?

TimeForge labor scheduling software has been upgraded to the latest version, version 1.8, at no charge to our customers, and this release includes a number of new features to make scheduling even more simple. Some of the latest features include:

1. Schedule by Department / Position or by Time. Wok shifts can be grouped together by position, or ordered by time, or both! When using the position / department groups, each group will display the total cost for the group, the number of shifts, and the total number of hours being scheduled. Schedule how you want to!
2. Employees can view the schedules of other employees. To enable this feature, login to TimeForge, click on “Setup“, and then choose “Settings for this Location“. In the “TimeForge Configuration” section, you will see a question which reads: “Do you want to allow your employees to view other employee’s schedules and contact information?” Make sure this option is set to “Yes”, and then save your settings. Any employee who logs into TimeForge.com can click on their “Schedules” tab, and then click on “Other Employee’s Schedules“. Employees can view the times, phone numbers, and assigned employees for all of the published labor schedules at your business.
3. Requests and Availability can be filtered by position or employee. For example, you can view the requests for only “Joe“, or you can look at all of the requests from your “Server” staff. To use this feature, click on the “Employees” tab, and then choose “Edit employee requests / availability“. Once on that screen, you can change the “Requests for:” drop-down to display specific requests, and then click on “Show” to actually see that information.

In addition to these new features, several bug fixes and speed improvements have been added to make TimeForge the premiere online employee scheduling package.

How long does it take to make your labor schedules? It should take less than 5 minutes! Did you know that TimeForge can streamline and minimize labor costs through effective employee scheduling at your restaurant, bar, club, or business.

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Lubbock, TX – May 21, 2007 – TimeForge.com, a scheduling application designed for the food-service industry, was released in February and has been quickly adopted by the hospitality industry. For years, electronic scheduling has been a growing alternative to “pen-and-paper” scheduling, but most electronic systems have been overly complex and cumbersome to use. Employee scheduling is now simple! The TimeForge.com software is easy to use, quick to implement, and provides an effective combination of quality software and extensive features, with monthly programs starting under $10 / month.

Along with the basic ability to quickly and easily create schedules that work for your business (including multi-week or monthly schedules), TimeForge.com includes AutoScheduler™, an automatic scheduling tool developed with leading industry experts. The AutoScheduler™ program simplifies the creation of schedules by accurately balancing employee requests, payroll costs, and staffing requirements. With the click of a mouse, the AutoScheduler™ can create an entire 7-day schedule for your business in under 30 seconds! Blazing fast scheduling combined with industry-leading reports puts you and your managers back where you belong …. on the floor with your customers.

TimeForge.com will automatically alert employees of newly posted schedules and schedule changes on a continual basis. Employees can be notified through the TimeForge.com website, email, or even daily text message alerts. Multiple notifications provide a solid scheduling system that eliminates any confusion about staff responsibilities. TimeForge.com also reduces the amount of time that managers spend on the phone with employees. Employees can log in to their individual TimeForge.com accounts and enter a work request (time off, school schedules, work preferences, etc…); the manager can then approve or deny employee requests at their convenience.

TimeForge.com can save your business time and money, and can reduce confusion and tension between the management and staff.

Sign up for your free trial at www.TimeForge.com today!

About TimeForge.com
TimeForge.com is an employee scheduling application designed for the hospitality and restaurant industries. Currently used by more than 100 restaurants, bars, and clubs from all over the United States, TimeForge.com is designed from the ground-up to simplify the complicated process of employee scheduling, with a single task in mind: to put management back where they belong – on the floor with customers.

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