Labor Management. NOW Simple.

Easy Labor Management – 5 Tips to Build Better Employee Schedules

• Employees who ride the clock are draining business profits. Monitor timesheets and schedules to effectively stop early clock ins. Better yet, use a labor management system that does both attendance and employee scheduling – and can enforce the schedule – such as TimeForge

• Fingerprint scanners are delicate pieces of technology. Use them to clock in/out. Don’t use them to enter PINs.   Restaurant and hospitality staff normally must enter a PIN / id into a Point of Sale system every few minutes, and with greasy hands, fingerprint scanners become defective quickly

• Not sure where your labor dollars are going? Check your fixed / non-variable (manager) salaries and your variable hours (hourly staff). You may be surprised at what you find as many labor dollars are tied up in non-variable staff members.

• Take time to review the schedule and compare sales and customer throughput to your staffing levels. High ratios can be very costly to your business.   A high ratio of labor to sales or customer throughput implies one of three business problems:
  1. Staff members are spending a lot of time with individual customers, and are not adequately serving customers who may be waiting (who then leave).
  2. The business is over-staffed, with more employees on site than are necessary.
  3. Profit per customer / order is too low, and needs to be raised.

  Act quickly to identify which problem is occurring, and solve it.

• Make sure only one manager per department is responsible for approving requests. Otherwise, there can be confusion about time off allotments.   If one manager approves a time off request for one staff member, and another manager approves a request for another staff member – the likelihood of upset staff, higher turnover, and staff shortages is significantly higher than if one manager is responsible for handling requests.   Good communication is key to labor management success.

TimeForge labor management software is used by owners and operators of restaurants, retail stores, bars, grills, and other service-oriented businesses to increase profits, reduce turnover, and improve retention.

Related articles or pages

• TimeForge Dashboard
• Labor Management Software Update Simplifies Employee Scheduling
• Enforce Scheduled Positions and Clock In Times
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 2)
• Workforce Labor Scheduling Updates (Part 1)

Read Part 1 of the November newsletter here.

Some of the improvements to the TimeForge products are detailed below.

TimeForge Scheduling – Improvements for Employees
The employee side of TimeForge Labor Scheduling has received a number of improvements over the past few months, including some major improvements this past weekend.   These include:

• Employees can now delete their own pending requests, without requiring manager approval.   This allows employees to become “available” for work without needing to involve management.

• Searching for available shifts is now easier than ever.   Employees can view qualified “open” shifts with a single click , or they can search for specific shifts by date and time.   Once a potential shift is found, a shift swap request can be made directly through TimeForge, with a single click.

• The employee interface has been improved to show shift notes, sections, and make the screens more user friendly.

TimeForge Scheduling – Improvements for Managers
The management side of TimeForge Scheduling has received many improvements over the past few months, including some important improvements this past weekend.   These include:

• The Schedule Summary screen now includes a number of useful metrics, including the number of variable hours scheduled, non-variable (management) hours scheduled, as well as the hours, labor costs, and the costs of breaks.   A number of other important numbers are recorded on this screen as well!

• Many of our users have requested the ability to forecast , forecasting for sales, customer counts, inventory orders, schedules, or staffing levels.   Many of you want to be able to compare labor costs, labor hours, or scheduled shifts directly to the projected numbers to see how the schedule stacks up.   In Excel, this is very hard to do accurately.   It’s now available in TimeForge! Managers with TimeForge Scheduling Basic, Pro, and Max can enter daily, hourly, or quarter-hour manager projections (or actual values), and TimeForge will display and enforce labor percentages in the schedule.   Check the TimeForge Blog for an upcoming tutorial on the usage of the TimeForge Forecasting System.

• Adding and editing schedules has never been easier!   TimeForge automatically adds new shifts as you type, reducing the number of clicks that it takes to create a schedule.   Also, the schedules can now be sorted by position, start time, end time, or employee.

Other information about the TimeForge update can be found in Part 1 and Part 3 of this newsletter.

Are complicated employee scheduling practices taking up precious time at your business? Are you making the best possible labor schedule? How much turnover is created because of bad, or late, schedules? Did you know that TimeForge can reduce turnover, improve retention and increase profits at your business? Sign up today for a free trial!

Related articles or pages

• TimeForge Newsletter , November Edition (Part 3)
• TimeForge Newsletter , November Edition (Part 1)
• Is Employee Scheduling Complicated? Not Anymore!
• In Hard Times, Retail and Restaurant Companies Should Control Costs
• Employee Scheduling Complicated? Not Anymore!