Labor Management. NOW Simple.

Sometimes, the best way to manage the labor is to look at your existing processes and procedures, look at what you’re doing to make schedules, and manage employees, and see if that’s the best possible way to do things.   Here are some simple labor management tips for you to build a superior staff schedule.   Of course, the best possible solution is to use employee scheduling software for your restaurant or retail business.

Simple Labor Management – 5 Pointers to Build Superior Employee Schedules

1. Staff members who ride the clock are wasting business profits. Babysit timesheets and schedules to efficiently put an end to early clock ins. Better yet, use a labor management system that will schedule the workforce and monitor attendance- and has the capabilities to implement the schedule- such as TimeForge!
2. Fingerprint scanners can be fragile bits of technology. Clock in or clock out with them. Do not use them to insert PINs into your Point of Sale system. Restaurant and hospitality personnel typically must enter a PIN/id into a POS system every few minutes to ring up orders, open / close a table, and perform other tasks. With greasy hands, fingerprint scanners become damaged almost immediately – make sure your equipment is up to the task.
3. Unsure where your labor dollars are going? Review your fixed/non-variable (manager) paychecks and your variable hours (hourly staff). You may be flabbergasted at what you find; many labor dollars are tied up in non-variable staff members.
4. Take time to analyze the schedule and customer throughput and compare sales to your staffing levels. High ratios can be extremely expensive to your business. A high ratio of labor to sales or customer throughput implies at leas one of three business dilemmas:
   1. Workers are spending a bunch of time with one particular customer, and are not sufficiently serving customers who may be waiting (who then disappear).
   2. The business is over-staffed, with more workers present than are called for.
   3. Income per customer/order is poor, and needs to be brought up.

   Act promptly to determine which issue you’re dealing with, and fix it.

5. Be certain that only one manager per department is in charge of approving requests. Any other way, and there can be bewilderment about time off allotments. If one manager authorizes a time off request for one employee, and second manager authorizes a request for another worker – the possibility of discontented staff, costly turnover, and insufficient staffing is considerably higher than if a single manager is in charge of requests. Exceptional communication is essential to labor management prosperity.

TimeForge is a Best of Breed labor management software, which will streamline your operations to offer the most efficient solution in scheduling, human resource management, attendance tracking, turnover reduction, and communications. Sign up for a free trial today to see what TimeForge can do for you!

Related articles or pages

• TimeForge Improvements
• Time and Attendance Made Easy
• Scheduling Salaried Staff
• Labor Management for Golf Courses
• How Do You Manage Labor?

One of the features that makes TimeForge easier to use and more efficient than other labor management platforms is our newly released, visually-demonstrated weekly schedules. The new weekly schedule charts allow business owners and managers in the retail, restaurant and hospitality industries to save time and capital when scheduling staff, keeping businesses ahead of their competition.

While building an employee schedule, a comprehensive daily graph is visible to demonstrate an interactive version of the day’s schedule. While managers are building their staff schedule they can view a weekly staffing chart to see a visual representation of employees’ schedules, by position and times, in an organized, color-coded chart to make scheduling staff members easier than ever.

Easily Schedule Staff by Looking at the Weekly Schedule

TimeForge founder Anthony Presley sought to solve some of the problems business owners often experience with employee scheduling:

“TimeForge has had daily staffing graphs and visualization for years, allowing managers and owners to quickly and easily visualize their staffing load throughout the day. Our new weekly graph extends this one step further, providing one click schedule validation and visualization. Managers can spot holes in the schedule where their business may be under or over-staffed.”

Take a look at our press release about the latest TimeForge features.

Sign up for a free trial of our labor management tool today!

Related articles or pages

• Part Two: Recruiting and Retaining Gen Y Employees
• Easily Manage Labor with Innovative Staffing Reports
• Generation Y Part One: Marketing
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 2)
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1)

Are you tired of sitting in front of the time clock to see when your staff members show up to clock in, or clock out for their shift? Monitoring time clocks is a time consuming way to manage employees and while it can often be an effective way to reduce payroll expenses, it also increases frustration and costs among managers and supervisors.

TimeForge already supports a number of ways to manage staff members without sitting in front of the time clock including:

• Online employee work scheduling accessible over the Internet,
• Web-based attendance that can be viewed remotely,
• Enforcing the schedule with a grace period for clocking in or out,
• Identifying “most different” time punches, and
• Allowing other staff members to act as a witness when employees show up before they are scheduled to work

We now go one step further! Fully manage your business remotely!

TimeForge can notify managers or supervisors when employees show up early or late, and when clocking in or clocking out. There are four new “Alerts” inside of each supervisor and manager account, controlling when alerts are sent to management personnel.

For example, you can receive email and TimeForge notifications when staff members show up more than 10 minutes early for their scheduled shift.

To configure these Alerts, log into TimeForge, go to your Settings page, and configure the applicable Alerts.

You should be using a labor management system to make your life easier! TimeForge can quickly and easily build your staff schedules, manage attendance, reduce labor costs, and streamline employee management. Sign up for a trial today!

Related articles or pages

• Part Two: Recruiting and Retaining Gen Y Employees
• Is Employee Scheduling Complicated? Not Anymore!
• Enforce Scheduled Positions and Clock In Times
• Employee Scheduling Complicated? Not Anymore!
• Turn the AutoScheduler Off or On

As recently reported on Nation’s Restaurant News, “(Sep. 27) Get in, set up an effective staff schedule and move on to the next task: that’s what most restaurateurs want out of their scheduling software. But knowing that doesn’t necessarily make their search for the right software any easier, as the schedulers available today run the gamut from elementary point-of-sale-system modules to high-end workforce management applications.

The trick, some operators indicate, is to find the right system or service for your operation without buying features that will go unused.”

NRN reviewed two products in their article:

• ScheduleAnywhere
• ScheduleWriter

TimeForge.com has all of the features of both of the reviewed products, with an easier to use interface, an integrated AutoScheduler, and better pricing! But then, I suppose we are biased.

You can read the full article at Nation’s Restaurant News. They require registration, but the registration is free.

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.

Related articles or pages

• National Restaurant Association 2009
• Support for Salaried Employees from within Dinerware
• Spend Less Time Scheduling Labor – More Time Managing Your Business
• Simple, Fast Employee Scheduling
• Restaurant, Bar, and Club Scheduling Options (Part 2 of 4)