Meta: Learn the best practices for scheduling employees in a restaurant, including how AI-powered tools can optimize staffing, predict customer inflow, and improve operational efficiency.
Good cooking and service are the keys to your restaurant’s success, but you know that it is not enough. Other than providing tasteful meals to your customers every night, you also need to optimize resources, avoid waste, and make the numbers add up.
Speaking of resource optimization and waste reduction, one of the biggest money drains in a restaurant is often overstaffing. When you have more employees working than you need, you’re throwing money away.
Scheduling employees effectively is one of the most challenging tasks of a restaurant manager. Because you want to provide your clients with the highest quality table service possible, you often end up having too many workers on the clock.
But can you predict next week’s customer turnout? How can you calculate the right number of employees for the expected clientele? Or how can you ensure every worker’s weekly rest? How can you schedule employees in a restaurant effectively?
In this article, we’ll show you the best practices for staff scheduling. Spoiler: AI can give you a big hand.
Set Up Work Shifts First
Before establishing a schedule for your employees, you need to set up a work schedule. You’ll need to analyze how your business operates and create shifts for when your employees will work. For example, you can establish that one of your employee will work only from 5 p.m. to 11 pm.
In this phase, it is also useful to establish how many rest days your employees will have every week.
Shifts and the number of rest days are going to be the fixed point of your schedule. You’ll only need to fill them up with the right number of employees.
Schedule your Scheduling
One of the staff scheduling best practices to implement if you want to optimize the process is to schedule a time for scheduling.
Decide the frequency with which you want to establish your workers’ shifts and set a date and time in advance to carry out this task. This will ensure tht you avoid running short on time and rush this delicate task. Still you will see below that majority of the work can be automated.
Assess Expected Clientele
The number of employees you’re going to need for every shift depends almost exclusively on the number of clients you expect to have every night. This is where things get hard. How can you predict customers’ inflow for next night or next week? How can you predict customers’ inflow for next season so that you know whether you need to hire extra staff?
You have two main tools:
- Your experience. Yesterday’s, last weekend’s, and last summer’s inflow can help you assess how many clients to expect tomorrow, the next weekend, and next summer.
- A custom AI tool. Season, local events, and exchange rates (important in tourist destinations) are all elements that an AI tool can take into account to predict the number of customers to expect on any given day.
Assess optimal staff needs
Once you know how many customers to expect, you need to assess how many workers you’ll need to cover their needs. AI can be helpful in this step too.
AI restaurant management tools not only tell you how many customers you can expect on any given day, but they also suggest the number of employees needed in every department (for example, four people in the kitchen, four at the tables, and one in reception).
Artificial Intelligence is extremely accurate even because it can be trained and can learn from past experience. For example, you can provide the tool with information about last night’s understaffing in the kitchen. From that moment on, the AI tool will take that information into consideration and suggest one additional worker for that amount of expected clientele.
Create a Schedule Template
When you know how many workers you’ll need in every shift, it’s time to create a written schedule that you can share with your employees. For this step, it’s recommended to have a schedule template that you just need to fill up with workers’ names.
AI tools can take care of this part too and they can do it automatically. Once you’ve configured it correctly, the AI would automatically fill up the staffing schedule. It would also guarantee that every worker has their rest days during the week and ensure optimal turnaround.
Adjust Over Time
When your staffing schedule is ready, you must be aware that it could be subject to changes. It can be frustrating: you’ve worked hard on such a tedious but necessary task and two days later you’re already dealing with a couple of workers asking for hours of leave because they have this or that urgent need. And yet, you can’t avoid it. The unexpected happens and you need to be ready to adjust.
Once again, scheduling adjusting is made easier with AI. Not only it can automatically adjust scheduling once given the new requirements, but it also makes any phase of the process more flexible.
Efficient Sharing
Last but not least, you want to make sure that any employee receives the shift schedule and has easy access to it during the week or month. Digital tools are the go-to option here. With them, employees can access work schedules from their smartphones and be aware of any changes made to them.
This phase can be easly automated. When the shift schedule is ready, the tool can automatically send it to the provided contacts or notify them any time a change is made.
How to Schedule Employees in a Restaurant: Conclusions
Effective employee scheduling is very important for the success of a restaurant, balancing the need for excellent customer service with resource optimization. By implementing the best practices discussed in this article, you can ensure optimal staffing while minimizing costs and improving flexibility. As you can see, AI tools provide a lot of help in automatingmany tasks and making the process more flexible, accurate, and stress free.
