Category: Staffing Management

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How to reduce labor costs in a restaurant without compromising on service

Running a restaurant business has never been easy. Eighty percent go bust within five years of opening, and the average profit margin for a full-service restaurant in the USA is just 3-5%. This is a sector where every cent still really counts.

Wages make up the majority of any eatery’s outgoings. With the hospitality landscape still in turmoil, controlling that expenditure while maintaining an attractive service is more important than ever. Rather than simply cutting staff and hoping for the best, try these strategies to reduce labor costs in your restaurant without diminishing your service offering.

Plan ahead to avoid unexpected costs

Predictive scheduling isn’t just a benefit to employees. Chaotic ad hoc scheduling costs you more as you bring in additional staff to fill shifts at the last minute. This makes it harder — impossible, even — to accurately predict your wage costs from month to month.

Depending on where you operate, you may already be legally obligated to use predictive scheduling, which involves setting staff schedules at least two weeks in advance. This allows staff to plan their personal lives more reliably, knowing they won’t suddenly be called into work. This reduces frustration and burnout and keeps staff happy and more productive. This, in turn, means lower employee turnover, which also saves you money in advertising and hiring.

Crucially, for restaurant managers, planning your shifts weeks in advance means you pay less in overtime as you’re able to more carefully plan who will work when. Using software to manage your time and attendance helps in this regard. Workforce.com will even warn you when you schedule staff who are coming up on overtime hours and identify alternative employees with normal working hours still to use.

Use data to schedule efficiently

Planning shifts in advance can protect your business from last-minute understaffing, but overstaffing is where labor costs really add up. Many restaurants, even those that are profitable, are still losing money through unnecessary wages because they’re not crunching the numbers when it comes to scheduling.

Many restaurants still rely on the “eyeball” method for setting staff levels. Wednesday afternoons always seem quiet, so fewer staff are scheduled. That works up to a point, but to find the real patterns driving your business, you need to be able to take months of data and sort it on a day-by-day, shift-by-shift, even hour-by-hour basis.

Seeing the long-term income vs. expenditure patterns needed for this granular efficiency is incredibly hard to do manually unless you happen to also be a statistician with lots of free time. This is another area where software like Workforce can help restaurants and hospitality businesses. By automatically collating all the relevant data, it can produce regular reports that spell out in detail where these smaller savings can be made, adding up over the financial year.

Overstaffing a shift doesn’t just cost you money; it can have a dramatic impact on your employees too. For customer-facing roles such as wait staff and bartenders, it directly eats into their income by spreading the available tips thinly across more staff. Efficient scheduling means more income for everyone.

Ditch the delivery apps

Not all of your labor costs will be direct. The pandemic saw an explosion in the use of delivery apps such as Grubhub and Uber Eats that allow customers to order food from restaurants for local delivery. However, with fees that can be as high as 30%, many restaurants — both chain and single location — are finding the additional business from these apps does not result in more profit.

In March 2020, even before lockdowns turbocharged the delivery app sector, TechCrunch research found the cost to the customer for ordering restaurant food via an app included a markup of between 17% and 40.5%. None of that extra profit finds its way back to the restaurants, which instead are expected to swallow the cost of discounts offered by the apps to entice new users.

These kinds of business practices are not going unchallenged. New York has already passed a permanent 15% cap on delivery app fees, and several New York state residents are the source of a class-action suit alleging that Grubhub, Postmates, DoorDash, and Uber Eats are operating a monopoly.

It’s understandable that for many restaurants, off-site customers now represent a significant part of their business. At the very least, you should consider how much you’re paying in fees to reach these app customers and whether that investment is paying off in a sustainable way. Controlling labor costs by hiring more staff may sound counterintuitive, but it may well be more cost-effective to hire your own delivery driver and directly serve fewer off-premises customers at a higher profit margin.

To reduce labor costs for a restaurant, dig deeper for big savings

If your strategy for wage efficiency is simply scheduling less staff on traditionally quiet nights, you’re missing long-term savings and eating into an already slim profit margin. A data-driven approach is the only way to maximize your efficiency, and for that, you need to really crunch the numbers — or use software like Workforce.com to do it for you.

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5 best ways to deal with short staffing

Summary

  • Labor shortage persists across the nation, spanning multiple industries

  • Unemployment benefits, COVID fears, and career reevaluations fueling shortage, among other reasons

  • Beat short-staffing with labor forecasting, scheduling in advance, increasing engagement, automating breaks, and cross-training

In what people are now dubbing The Great American Labor Shortage, businesses across the United States are suffering from severe understaffing issues – and small businesses are taking the biggest hit.

Indeed, recovery is happening slowly. The National Restaurant Association says that, as of July, the industry is within 1 million jobs of its pre-pandemic peak – this is after three consecutive months of increasing employment levels. Nevertheless, short staffing still persists. The NFIB found in July of this year that 49% of small businesses reported having job openings they could not fill – the historical average is 22%. Restaurants are still experiencing the most difficulty with this, even in the face of recovery. Many of them, both local and franchise alike, are having to slash opening hours a significant amount due to low availability of staff. You know it’s bad when Alabama Chick-fil-As are closing early nearly every day of the week. 

Needless to say, this is as concerning as it is stressful for hardworking business owners, HR and front-line managers everywhere. After such a tumultuous year as 2020, one would think that things could only get better with the economy opening back up. Clearly, the staffing recovery is happening much slower than people hoped for or expected. 

Why the shortage exists

So why is this all happening you may be wondering? Well, there are several contributing factors to the problem; each probably plays a role in its own way. Understanding these causes will better inform how to schedule an understaffed business more effectively.

The first and most obvious reason is that people are afraid of COVID-19 still. Recently, the Census Bureau found that 3.9 million people are not returning to work because they fear catching or spreading the virus. The increasing prevalence of the Delta variant only adds to this already strong concern for personal health.  

And why bother risking going back to work when you can live comfortably without a job? Herein lies the second potential reason for the labor shortage: unemployment benefits may have acted as disincentives. The American Staffing Association reported that some people made as much as $6 more per hour on unemployment insurance with pandemic bonuses. Due to these benefits, perhaps it makes sense that people don’t want to return to work. 

However, the problem is not that simple.

26 states withdrew federal unemployment benefits in June and July, months before the Sept. 6 due date. In a recent study, it was found that there was no meaningful difference in increases of shift work between states that ended benefits and states that continued benefits. In fact, states that ended the benefits only saw a 2.2% growth in shift work between May and July, as opposed to a 4.1% growth in states that continued benefits. Clearly, there are other, more personal factors keeping people from returning to work.

While unemployment benefits and pandemic fears are the most discussed causes, they might coincide with a longer-running trend. 

The United States has a rapidly aging population and in turn, a shrinking workforce. Many industries are affected by this trend, and the pandemic only served to exacerbate it. Older workers probably chose to retire early in the face of remote work. Others may have relocated to work remotely in an attempt to spend more time with their families. 

Whatever the reasoning may be, the fact remains that industries across the United States are struggling to attract young workers to replace retiring older workers. The healthcare industry knows this well, as they are facing a nursing shortage. The NCBI reports that 1 million RNs are over the age of 50 and that in 10 to 15 years, about one-third of the current nursing workforce is due to retire. Slightly alarming, right?

These staffing shortages impact a variety of markets, ranging from hospitality to healthcare. With a multitude of factors causing the shortages, it can be extremely difficult to address each problem directly. There are, however, a few simple techniques you can use in your scheduling system that may help. 

Solve the shortage with better scheduling 

One of the best ways to handle an understaffed workforce is to adopt more efficient scheduling techniques. With smarter scheduling, managers can get the most value out of their limited number of employees. As the old saying goes, “work smarter, not harder.”

1.) Use Labor Forecasting

Automated employee scheduling software exists now that makes the creation of schedules quite simple. Labor forecasting is perhaps the most impressive example of what this technology can do. It looks at historical sales data and other external factors, predicting how many employees are needed for certain shifts. Not only does this ensure proper staffing numbers but it also helps maximize productivity. Managers should use labor forecasting analytics during staffing shortages to accurately schedule their scarce employees at the right times to best meet predicted demand.

2.) Make Schedules in Advance

Tools like labor forecasting software help expedite the scheduling process; this allows managers to send schedules to employees far in advance. Doing this gives employees ample time to plan their personal lives accordingly. With a dedicated workforce management platform, these schedules are published in one place for everyone to see, no matter where they are. When faced with a staff shortage, publishing schedules early is extremely important because it ensures dedication to upcoming shifts. It also allows for early communication regarding potential conflicts – shift conflicts are often a nightmare to deal with last minute while shorthanded.  

3.) Increase Employee Engagement

Simply publishing schedules early isn’t always enough. Managers need to empower their employees with tools for communication. Shift swapping software lets workers signal via phone notifications if they need a shift covered; co-workers can then choose to claim a shift with the tap of a finger. Utilizing a shift-swapping tool lets employees adapt quickly and efficiently to schedule conflicts. 

Shift feedback is also critical for handling a short-staffed business. By allowing employees to briefly rate different aspects of their shifts, managers gain valuable insight into how their employees perform under certain conditions.

4.) Automate Breaks

With understaffing comes the risk of overworking. It is tempting for workers to skip breaks in order to keep up with demand; however, this can be disastrous for a manager trying to avoid labor compliance violations. With automated workforce management software, managers can input their own required fields for employee break times. These breaks then show up automatically in every schedule created. If an employee misses a break, starts it late, ends it early, etc., the manager will be notified. 

Errors in break times are very common in short-staffed environments, but by scheduling more efficiently with the proper software, these errors can easily be mitigated. 

5.) Cross-Train Employees

Finally, it is worth considering cross-training employees to perform multiple job roles. In a short-hand environment, it is always useful to have people on duty capable of performing a variety of tasks when needed. Cross-training makes scheduling much easier since the manager will almost always have people with the right qualifications on duty. 

Dealing with a staffing shortage is no easy task. The issue is something business owners in many industries have had to deal with forever, and there are really no definitive answers on how to solve it. However, utilizing more efficient scheduling techniques will nearly always help. Scheduling is one of the main things under the complete control of a manager, even in the face of a labor shortage.

Curious to learn more? Check out our webinar below featuring the founder of Grategy Coaching, Lisa Ryan.

Webinar: How to Schedule While Understaffed

 

Want to take immediate action? Innovative scheduling software like Workforce.com gives managers the necessary tools to start allocating labor more efficiently. 

Book a call with one of our team members to learn more, or try our software for free today. 

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Simple shift replacement: A home run for the Lake Elsinore Storm

Summary

  • Last-minute schedule changes are difficult to manage without the right technology

  • Modern workforce management solutions make shift replacements easy

  • Minor league baseball team the Lake Elsinore Storm use Workforce.com’s shift replacement tool constantly

Uh oh, looks like Last Minute Linus can’t make it to his prep cook shift tonight. To make matters worse, it is a Friday – the busiest night of the week. Someone needs to cover his shift. So begins the feverish process of cold calling and texting dozens of employees to find a shift replacement. Sounds familiar, right?

If so, that’s a problem. There is simply no reason to overcomplicate replacing employee shifts. However, many in the hospitality industry are doing just this.

Businesses struggling with schedule changes

According to a study from earlier this year, 69% of schedules are made on paper or word processors. Because of this, navigating scheduling logistics is taking far too long. About 29% of employers say approving schedule changes and shift swaps takes the most time in the scheduling process. When dealing with shift replacements, 75% of managers claim to only call, text, or email employees to communicate. 

Combing through your phone and email contact lists like this takes valuable time, as does manually updating schedules with every last-minute change. 

Fortunately, there is an easier way to orchestrate all of this. 

Easy shift swapping

Workforce.com facilitates easy shift replacements all in one place for every employee and manager to see. No more texting seven different people to figure out who can cover who. Right from their phone, an employee can signal a need for a shift swap; this sends a notification to all their team members. These team members can then view information about the available shift and decide for themselves if they will claim it or not. Once a swap happens, all a manager needs to do is review and approve it with one click. Boom. It’s that easy.

Also Read: Shift swap software empowers managers and employees to take charge of scheduling

Utilizing efficient shift replacement technology benefits both employers and employees. According to a whitepaper published by Workforce.com, shift replacement tools empower managers to reduce overtime and lower under/overstaffing. For employees, the technology provides a better work/life balance as well as the ability to build camaraderie through more effective communication.

Time savings in Minor League Baseball

Many businesses know firsthand the positive impact shift replacement software has on their scheduling efficiency. Recently, we reached out to the Lake Elsinore Storm, a minor league baseball affiliate of the San Diego Padres, to hear about their experience using Workforce.com. 


“One of my favorite features is the shift replacement feature where I can see who’s not available for a shift and who is available to pick it up and don’t have to worry about reaching out to people,” says Katie, an HR generalist for the team. The Storm has a heavy emphasis on hospitality, employing a staff of over for a variety of roles encompassing restaurant service, ticketing, concessions, and groundskeeping. 

Before implementing the software, Katie found that personally overseeing shift replacements was eating up a lot of her time. This has since changed with the switch to Workforce.com: “I don’t have to worry about reaching out to people last minute, getting on the phone, sending emails. I know that it just shows up on someone’s phone and they can pick it up.”

Right there lies the real beauty of Workforce.com’s shift replacement feature; it empowers employees with the ability to take part in the scheduling process. Through this empowerment, unnecessary work is offloaded from the manager directly to the employee, saving time and money while maximizing convenience.

For Lake Elsinore Storm, the time savings brought about by key features such as shift replacement were well recognized across upper management. “It’s almost like we have another assistant or another employee working with us that is really intelligent and smart and knows what it’s doing … it’s really a time-saver,” states Christine Kavic, the Storm’s CFO.

The Storm have many different employee teams set up on Workforce.com, each serving different areas of hospitality. From the taproom staff to stadium maintenance crew, all teams work in unison to make game days go smoothly. Because of this variety, Lake Elsinore Storm management understands more than most what it takes to efficiently schedule a workforce in the hospitality industry. A result of this is high customer satisfaction through exceptional service to the public – something the team prioritizes. 

“Without Workforce.com, we could not do what we do best, and that is entertain the community,” says Kavic. 

Experience it for yourself

Replacing shifts shouldn’t be a hassle; in fact, it should be the easiest part of scheduling. Since Workforce.com’s shift replacement tool has been a big hit (sorry, I had to do it) in baseball stadium management, maybe it’s time you try it for free to see how it works. You won’t believe how simple it is.

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How to use Excel employee schedule timesheets – and why you no longer need them

Ensuring your employees are at work when they’re supposed to be and work the hours they’ve been scheduled for is at the heart of any business. Without accurate attendance data, your company efficiency suffers and payroll becomes chaotic. Despite this, the 2021 Workforce Management Trends survey found that one in 10 companies still track time and attendance manually. At the same time, 50% of companies reported that their biggest challenge was manual errors in attendance data.

 

A common way of logging staff attendance is on a spreadsheet, such as Excel employee schedule timesheets. Getting to grips with Excel requires a little practice, and it is time-consuming even once you’ve got a system in place, but it’s an improvement over outdated pen-and-paper records. Once you’ve understood how to manually calculate timecards in Excel, there are employee scheduling software solutions that will make the process even easier and more efficient.

How to do timesheets in Excel

Using Excel, or any similar spreadsheet such as Google Sheets, to keep track of employee schedules and timesheets has several advantages over pen-and-paper methods:

  • You can take advantage of formulas so that calculations are done for you.
  • It’s faster than writing entries by hand.
  • All records are easily kept together within a file and easily shared.

Here’s how to get started.

DOWNLOAD THE EXCEL TIMESHEET TEMPLATE

An advantage of Excel is that it has a free timesheet template already set up for basic functionality. That means it has the main formulas already entered, so you don’t need to spend time working those out.

CREATE A NEW SHEET FOR EACH EMPLOYEE

Using the plus icon at the bottom of the screen, create separate timesheets for all your employees and fill in the employee, manager, and pay period details at the top of each one.

It’s always a good idea to keep a blank version of the template on a separate sheet in your workbook so you can copy and paste it to add more new employees later.

FILL IN EACH EMPLOYEE’S SHIFT DATA

Using information from your time clock, or whatever method you use to check employees in and out, start at the top of the data entry section and fill in dates worked, time in, lunch start, lunch end, and time out.

Be aware that for the formulae to automatically calculate hours worked, the Excel employee schedule timesheet template requires time to be entered in the format HH:MM and uses a 24-hour clock—so 5:00 pm should be entered as 17:00. It also assumes lunch breaks – if offered – are unpaid.

GET THE TOTAL HOURS WORKED

If you have entered the data using the correct format, the total hours worked should automatically be calculated at the top of the timesheet.

SEPARATE REGULAR HOURS FROM OVERTIME

If you are updating your timesheets daily and have entered the total weekly hours an employee is contracted for, you will be able to see when an employee is getting close to exceeding their scheduled shifts under the Overtime Hours heading.

REPEAT THIS PROCESS FOR EVERY SHIFT FOR EACH EMPLOYEE

This will be the most laborious part of the process, so be sure to come up with a sustainable system for how and when this information is entered. Keeping daily records is ideal, so discrepancies are spotted as early as possible. Putting aside a large chunk of time each week to enter all the timecard information can also work, but it is not ideal.

Dealing with the disadvantages of Excel employee schedule timesheets

Just because a spreadsheet can do something doesn’t mean it was designed with that task in mind. While Excel employee schedule timesheets will get the job done, there are numerous problems with relying on this method.

It’s time-consuming: Manually entering data for every employee is very time-consuming, and that problem only gets worse the larger your company becomes. Repeating the above process for 20, 50, or 100 staff members or more will eat up a large chunk of your working week—or cost you extra in hiring someone to do it for you.

It’s prone to errors: While a spreadsheet is better than pen and paper, research has found that as many as 90% of all Excel spreadsheets contain errors. Even small mistakes when copying information across from timecards can cost you money, either in overpayments or in damaging wage and hour lawsuits.

It’s reactive rather than proactive: Updating spreadsheets by hand means you do not see real-time attendance data, and if you don’t input the data regularly, you’ll always be reacting to yesterday’s information, and that’s if you update daily. If you only update your spreadsheet weekly—or even less frequently—it’s easy to fall behind and be caught out, for example, if an employee’s hours have already gone into overtime by the time you enter their data.

It’s vulnerable: Spreadsheet files are fast becoming as impractical and outdated as paper files, becoming large and cumbersome over time as you track multiple employees across the financial year. Not only are such files slow and limited in accessibility, saving this much essential data in one place means you’re always one computer crash or corrupted hard drive away from a data catastrophe.

All-in-one attendance and employee scheduling software is the ideal solution

All of the pitfalls of Excel employee schedule timesheets are easily avoided by using intelligent workforce management software that has been specifically developed with both managers and employees in mind. Workforce.com’s employee scheduling software is also a fully-integrated time and attendance system, so you can track staff hours and collect data in real-time without the need for manual timesheet entry. This gives managers an accurate view of staff and shifts minute by minute, freeing up their time to concentrate on the management tasks that really matter.

Still have questions about creating timesheets in Excel? Go ahead and reach out to us. We are here to help.

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Vaccine mandates: what are they and how should businesses handle them

Summary

  • Under Biden’s mandate, companies with 100+ employees now must require vaccinations or weekly testing for all workers

  • Vaccine mandates face pushback, both currently and in the past, with 45% of the U.S. population choosing not to be vaccinated

  • Businesses can use qualification tags, notifications, and shift questions to manage employee vaccination and testing status

The COVID-19 delta variant is becoming a serious threat across the nation. Mask mandates are back in vogue and remote work is once again looming on the horizon – all this and flu season hasn’t even begun.

In light of all this, many businesses have turned to their own internal vaccine mandates. One of the largest breweries in the world, Molson Coors, announced earlier this year a vaccine mandate for all non-union corporate, sales, and contract employees. Some states like Washington and Connecticut have also issued strict mandates for government and healthcare employees.

Biden’s Mandate

This trend has made its way into federal policy recently with the introduction of President Biden’s new vaccine mandate that will affect around 80 million people. Businesses with over 100 workers now must require vaccinations or weekly testing for all their employees – the alternative is a $14k fine. Ouch.

And the mandate does not stop there.

Anyone involved with the federal government in any capacity must show proof of vaccination with no weekly testing as an alternative. This means federal employees, contractors, and federally funded healthcare workers all are required to be vaccinated.

Government officials in states like Texas, South Carolina, and Florida are pushing back, with many citing the new mandates from the administration as overreaching and unconstitutional. Florida governor Ron DeSantis recently signed an executive order in direct retaliation to Biden’s mandate. The rule bans Florida employers and businesses from requiring people to provide proof of vaccination. Failure to comply with the vaccine passport ban results in a $5,000 fine per case. How this state rule will clash with the federal mandate remains to be seen.

This kind of contention is nothing new.

A Divisive History

Vaccine requirements in the past have almost always been met with resistance, and occasionally even full-blown lawsuits. Medical workers in Houston are suing their hospital a second time now after their first case was dismissed earlier this year. The 61 employees are suing in the wake of being suspended and fired for failure to comply with their hospital’s stringent vaccine requirements.

Unions have also traditionally held anti-vaccine mandate policies.

In Chicago, the police union refused to comply with local vaccine requirements announced last month. In fact, the union is reportedly prepared to go to court over the matter. However, many other unions have changed their policies in light of both Biden’s mandates as well as the FDA’s approval of Pfizer last month. Even so, vaccine mandates are still a topic of division among unions – this is something important for companies to keep in mind when navigating Biden’s new requirements.

Staying Compliant

Needless to say, there is a lot of tension surrounding vaccine passport culture. Whether the new mandates are constitutional or not, the fact of the matter is they are here, and business owners everywhere need to do their best to stay compliant.

For companies with 100+ employees not involved with the federal government, the first step to staying compliant is understanding who is exempt from vaccination.

According to the EEOC, an employer cannot issue a blanket vaccine requirement without providing appropriate exceptions for employees with certain medical conditions or religious beliefs. If workers cite one of these exceptions, employers can only mandate that they provide weekly negative test results.

Understanding the laws and technicalities surrounding all these changes is one thing; effectively adapting a workforce management system to these changes is a whole other matter.

Qualifications and Accommodations

There are two primary areas to keep in mind when dealing with the onset of nationwide vaccine mandates: qualifications and accommodations. Managers need to learn how to properly balance vaccine qualification requirements for specific jobs with accommodations for employees that meet exemptions. Accomplishing this balance will translate to an organized and collaborative workforce.

To potentially assist with balancing qualifications and accommodations, Workforce.com offers a few useful features.

The Limiting Scheduling According to Qualifications feature allows managers to keep track of and update employee certifications required for specific jobs. Since vaccines are essentially a kind of certification now, this feature is nearly essential in 2021. By adding a vaccinated status to the customizable qualifications list, managers are able to automatically restrict shifts to various employees.

Joseph Cuellar, a software consultant at Workforce.com, notes, “recently we’ve seen a lot of companies use the qualifications feature to make sure they’re on top of vaccination requirements.” In the coming months, this trend is likely to continue.

Another way for businesses to manage their COVID-19 vaccine and testing requirements is to have employees answer pertinent questions when clocking in. With Workforce.com, managers can prompt employees with questions like these to confirm that they understand the vaccine and testing requirements associated with employment, or confirm that they’ve not exhibited symptoms of COVID-19.

As previously mentioned, these vaccine related qualifications for shifts must be balanced with accommodations.

Some employees may meet one of the two exceptions for getting vaccinated, and organizations should consider properly accommodating them. If they choose not to, they run the risk of losing significant human capital at a time when national staffing shortages are plaguing various industries.

To successfully accommodate exempt employees, both the qualifications tool as well as clock-in questions may be used. Managers can also send weekly reminder notifications to exempt employees to get tested. They can also create a custom qualification tag for testing status that expires after a week. As a daily safeguard, clock-in questions regarding proof of negative tests can also be used.

Vaccine-heavy Future

At the end of the day, if your company has over 100 workers, it is safest to assume that you’ll need a way to keep track of vaccination status across your workforce. Tracking the status of vaccinations and negative test results can be complicated, but there are ways to make it a clear and concise process with workforce management solutions.

Times are hard. Let us make them a little easier for you. Chat with us today over the phone about handling vaccines and testing requirements, or leave your email below and one of our team members will be in touch.

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Shift bids vs shift swaps – which is right for your business?

Being flexible with shift work is good for business. Even before the pandemic created a nationwide staffing shortage, employees were making it clear that a better work/life balance was becoming a top priority.

A 2019 survey (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-research-shows-that-flexible-working-is-now-a-top-consideration-in-the-war-for-talent-300818790.html) by IWG found that 80% of workers would choose a job with a flexible schedule over one that did not, and more than 30% considered flexibility more important than extra vacation days or a prestigious job title. In addition, a different survey (https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/survey-flexible-work-job-choices/) in the same year found 80% of workers would be more loyal to their employer if they had more flexibility over when they worked, with over half trying to negotiate adding this perk with their current manager.

There are two popular ways to inject flexibility into your shift scheduling: shift bids and shift swaps. While they appear similar, they differ in subtle but important ways, and the right one for you will depend on the specifics of your business.

Shift bids and shift swaps – what’s the difference?

Put simply, shift bids are when the manager invites workers to put themselves forward for open shifts. Shift swaps allow workers to arrange to take each other’s shifts directly.

Shift bid example: A retail worker informs the manager that they can’t come in as scheduled on Friday because of a medical appointment. The manager chooses which staff members are best suited to fill that shift and lets them know an extra shift is up for grabs. The manager then chooses who will take the shift from those that express an interest.

Shift swap example: A restaurant worker has a childcare emergency and can’t come in for their scheduled afternoon shift, so they ask their colleague to swap shifts. The colleague agrees, and they present the solution to their manager, who approves it.

Each approach has the desired result: the empty shift is filled. Both are also easily implemented with the right scheduling software, but which method works best for your business depends on several factors.

 

Shift bids keep the manager in control

There are benefits and limitations to shift bids that you should be aware of before considering using them.

Benefits of shift bids

  • The manager gets a choice of different staff members to fill a shift and can pick the best suited. This helps maintain a well-rounded shift with employees who possess all the required skills and experience and work well together.
  • Managers using shift bids may also keep an eye on who is close to working overtime and favor those with fewer hours on the clock, thus controlling costs and spreading available work more evenly.
  • A shift bids system can expand to fill all shifts, not just absences. Workers can rank all available shifts according to their preference, and the manager can use that data to put together a schedule that accommodates as many people as possible.
  • Staff using shift bids have more control over when they work by only putting themselves forward for shifts that fit around their life.

Limitations of shift bids

  • The shift bids approach won’t suit every worker, and some can find the need to bid for their shifts to be stressful.
  • Shift bids can be prone to favoritism and need to be carefully monitored to ensure bids are being handled fairly. This is an area where scheduling software can help, as you can easily check your shift data over time and identify patterns where certain staff members are scheduled – or not – more than others.

Shift swaps can be quick and painless

Shift swaps are simpler to manage than shift bids, but have other pros and cons worth considering.

Benefits of shift swaps

  • By having staff arrange coverage between themselves, shift swaps save the manager’s time.
  • With reliable staff, shift swaps can solve many scheduling issues before they even become a problem.
  • Shift swaps are better suited to solving urgent staffing needs, such as last-minute absences, as they don’t require employees to go through the bidding process.

Limitations of shift swaps

  • The manager has less control over who takes a shift, so unbalanced staff rosters are a risk.
  • Unregulated shift swaps can be prone to over-use by employees and require a robust company policy to clarify the conditions under which shift swaps will be approved.

Choosing the right approach for your company

The scheduling method best suited to your company will depends on several factors.

Company culture

In environments where top-down management is the norm, shift bids are likely to be a better fit. But in businesses where employees are used to having greater autonomy, they’ll likely prefer to arrange shift swaps themselves.

Company size

The larger the company, the more effective shift bidding becomes, as having more staff available to bid on shifts means more choice for managers. And vice versa; the fewer staff members there are, the fewer variables the manager has to keep track of when shifts are swapped.

Worker and managerial experience

A shift swap system works well for companies or locations with reliable long-term staff. For that reason, shift swaps can also benefit new managers or managers who are unfamiliar with all the employees, as it means there is less need to match workers to shifts personally.

All these factors are prone to change over time, but resist the temptation to mix and match shift bids and shift swaps at the same time. Instead, it is better to pick one flexible scheduling system and stick with it for clarity for staff and simplicity for managers.

Flexible shifts help attract and retain staff, and whichever way you approach them will require well-thought-out processes. However, if the practical complexities still seem intimidating, remember that scheduling solutions such as Workforce.com can help automate and track shift bids and shift swaps, freeing up valuable time and headspace for managers.

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How to reduce labor costs and attract quality staff in a post-Covid market

The challenge of attracting quality staff while trying to reduce labor costs is one that has taken on fresh urgency in the post-Covid labor market. This is particularly true where hourly shift work is concerned, as staff question their priorities after a year in lockdown.

Thankfully, there are several ways to find – and retain – good workers while still controlling your labor costs. It just requires a little recalibration of how you think about incentives and staff management.

Use flexible working rather than salary incentives

One myth that we can dispel quickly is that the only way to attract quality staff is by offering larger salaries. That’s been the assumed wisdom for decades but is now an outdated view of what people want from a job.

Increasingly workers are saying that flexible working hours are now their priority, with multiple studies showing that the ability to fit work around other areas of their life is a key consideration when job hunting. One pre-pandemic study found that if given the option of a job with flexible hours and one without, 80% of workers would choose the job with flexible hours. The same study found that 30% considered flexible working more attractive than extra vacation days or a prestigious job title.

Offering flexible hours not makes your company more attractive to workers, but it makes staff more likely to stay with you for the long term. A survey for FlexJobs found that 80% of workers would be more loyal to their current job if it gave them more flexibility.

The reason for this is that the way we perceive value in work has changed. “If you’re a parent and you have three kids to pick up from school every day at 3:30, then flexible working actually adds a lot of value to you”, explains Josh Cameron, Workforce’s Chief Strategy Officer. “If you can pick or swap out of the shifts, that’s more important to you than getting an extra $2 an hour, because you have to pay someone to pick up and look after your kids. The extra dollars are not adding value.”

Systems such as shift bidding are an excellent way to incorporate flexibility into a business, help reduce labor costs by not adding additional expense on your payroll, and are easily managed using staff management software such as Workforce.com.

You don’t need to cut wages to reduce labor costs

It’s a mistake to think that the only way to reduce labor costs is to cut staff or lower wages. One of the best ways to save money is by getting more value for what you already spend, and one of the most common ways that businesses fail to do this is by losing track of productivity against wages.

You can save money in real terms by ensuring that hours worked and hours scheduled match up, cross-referencing with hourly income using workforce analytics to check you are getting the productivity you’re paying for. It may sound basic, but you’d be surprised how many companies still have their data spread across multiple files or systems and simply assume the numbers match at the end of each day.

“Most people never check the schedule matches what people actually work,” says Josh Cameron. “They might have a really good shift plan, and that’s in one system, but then the attendance data is in another system, and people are clocking in and clocking out of that. And the manager is basically just blindly ticking things because that’s what was clocked. If they even wanted to cross-check that, it would be a big exercise. People don’t do it. What’s much better is to have the schedule and the attendance in one system, so you can tick these things off throughout the day or at the end of the shift and if there are differences, you can go see why that happens.”

Listen to feedback to stop staff churn

Once you’ve attracted good workers with flexible hours and made sure you’re getting full value for those hours worked, it’s important to remember that you can help to reduce labor costs by keeping those staff in your business. Replacing employees costs money in advertising the vacant roles, onboarding and training, and lost productivity as working routines are disrupted. Gallup found in 2019 that US businesses lose a trillion dollars every year simply from the cost of replacing staff.

How do you stop staff from leaving? Listen to what’s bugging them about their job, and fix problems wherever possible. The idea of employers giving performance feedback to employees is widely accepted, but it’s also important for employees to be able to give feedback on the company.

“If you’re asking why people quit, by allowing people a way of giving feedback on their shifts, they feel ‘Hey, I have a way of being heard in this job, I actually am important,’” says Josh Cameron. “Managers can look at that feedback and analyze it and be like, ‘This is what’s causing problems. We’ve got these structural things that make it hard to work in this shift and that’s making it hard for people.’”

This is why Workforce.com allows staff to give feedback not just in general, but on the specific shifts they work. This allows managers to identify the pain points that cause staff to leave, and make changes. It may be something as common as a particular manager being hard to work with. It may be that a certain location gets uncomfortably hot on summer afternoons. Whether the answer means shuffling the staff roster, or something as easy as investing in an aircon unit, you’re empowered to spot the leaks in your staffing and plug them before they cost you any more revenue.

Think beyond the hiring process

There will always be sledgehammer approaches to reducing labor costs, but the current labor market conditions where potential employees are empowered to say “no” to jobs that don’t work for them, require a more nuanced approach. Companies save money when they hire the right people and get the best out of those people, and that means making sure they want to stay with you for the long term. From offering more flexible working arrangements to identifying the problems that drive staff away, Workforce.com can help at every stage.

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How to Calculate Time Cards Manually: Foolproof Step-by-Step Instructions

Calculating your employees’ time cards accurately is crucial to your business. Not only does it ensure you’re paying your employees the right amount, but it also helps you make sure you’re not scheduling anyone for too many or too few hours, and it allows you to understand what staffing levels your business needs to function at its best.

New small business owners may find that calculating time cards manually works well for them initially, especially if they have a small number of hourly employees and few work hours to track. Even more established businesses that are using Excel spreadsheets, timesheet calculators, or other time tracking methods for calculating hours should know how the math works. That way, even with a computer, you’ll be able to spot and correct any inevitable errors.

Once you understand how to do manual time card calculations, it’s also important to know what problems you may face with that method, such as how much time it takes and how easy it can be for employees to commit time theft. Then we’ll show you how time and attendance software can address those issues and make the entire process a breeze.

How to do the math for time cards by hand

Manually tracking employee hours by hand is an old method, but it works. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1

Convert an employee’s start and end hours for the day, as well as any unpaid break time, to 24-hour time, also known as military time.

For example, your employee began working at 9:22 a.m., took a lunch break from 12:30-1:15 p.m., and ended their day at 5:08 p.m. In a 24-hour time span, the hours past 12 p.m. must be converted, so 1:15 p.m. becomes 13:15, and 5:08 p.m. becomes 17:08.

Step 2

Convert the minutes into decimal format—instead of minutes out of 60, make them percentages of 100. To do this, you can either use a chart or simply divide the minutes by 60.

In our example, this means your employee’s clock-in and clock-out times become 09.37 and 12.50 for the first half of their shift and 13.25 and 17.13 for the second half of their shift.

Step 3

Subtract the employee’s shift start times from the end times.

12.50 – 09.37 = 03.13 and 17.13 – 13.25 = 03.88

Step 4

Add the working hours from step three together to get the total for the day.

03.13 + 03.88 = 07.01

So your employee worked a little over seven hours total.

Step 5

Repeat these steps for each day worked within the pay period, and add all the days together for the total hours the employee worked within the workweek. Multiply the total by their hourly rate to determine their gross pay before deductions.

Bonus Step

If an employee works overtime and is paid an overtime rate, you’ll want to calculate and note it separately to make sure they receive the correct overtime pay.

 

 

The issues with calculating time cards manually

While doing the math by hand works when calculating employee hours, there are also plenty of reasons to be wary of it, from the amount of time it takes to the ways it makes your business vulnerable to theft.

Storing physical time cards and keeping them secure

Calculating manual time cards requires either the manager or employees to keep accurate physical time cards, which can be damaged or destroyed. The time cards and the documents you use to calculate them must be stored securely, taking up office or storage space. Accessing these documents for auditing or other reasons can be difficult and time-consuming, particularly if the records aren’t kept in an organized manner.

Spending time doing calculations and Chasing information

You may not mind having to take the time to calculate time cards manually, but if you have more than a few employees, it’s going to take a while to do the calculations and complete your payroll duties.

If employee time cards are handwritten or if your time clock runs out of ink, there may be times recorded that are illegible, which means you need to spend time contacting employees or managers to figure out what the times are supposed to be. Correcting mistakes also takes extra time since you have to track down the physical timesheets and redo the math.

Risking the possibility of employee time theft

Time theft is easy for employees to commit when you use paper time cards or calculate time by hand, and it’s difficult for employers to track. Employees can commit time theft in a number of ways, such as by saying they worked more regular hours than they actually did, by clocking in and then not starting work for 20 minutes, or by having a friend at work clock them in when they aren’t there, so people don’t know they’re late.

This could also happen unintentionally. If an employee forgets their clock-in or clock-out times, you have to rely on their memory or on their manager or co-workers remembering the number of hours the employee worked, which could easily lead to inaccuracies that result in employees being overpaid or underpaid.

Leaving the door open for potential fraud

When you calculate your employees’ time cards manually, there’s more wiggle room for employers to commit fraud. This can happen accidentally, for example, if an employer loses track of the number of hours an employee worked or intentionally if a manager is skimming time off employees’ hours to stay in budget. Either way, shorting employees on their hours worked or overtime pay is wrong, and for companies, it can result in overtime rule violations, penalties, and fines.

Difficulty understanding the big picture

A general lack of oversight and control is another negative. When you need to check all your employees’ hours by hand, it’s hard to know who’s about to hit the max number of hours they can work, if you’re staying within your budget for staffing costs, or what the optimal staffing levels are. These are things you want to be able to know with a quick look.

How time and attendance software can solve the issues

By using a digital time and attendance solution, you can improve your business by ensuring employee time cards are accurate, secure, and easy.

electronically track and store time card information

With Workforce.com’s time and attendance software, there are no physical time cards or recordkeeping to track. Everything is done through the app, making accessing time card records simple. Because all the information is kept in a secure online system, you don’t have to worry about maintaining organized files in an office or fear they’ll get damaged.

Automate calculations and Clock-in/Clock-Out notifications

When your employees clock in with Workforce.com, they do so either on an app on their mobile device or on a tablet kept at their workplace. Notifications can prompt them when it’s time to clock in or clock out, and their hours are calculated automatically, so you never have to concern yourself with illegible handwritten time cards, employees forgetting to clock in or out, or having to calculate time cards by hand.

Protect against employee time theft and fraud

Workforce.com’s software’s electronic photo verification controls make it next to impossible for employees to have their co-workers punch in for them, and system controls can prevent employees from clocking in early themselves, reducing the possibility of employee time theft. Labor compliance reporting helps make sure employers are following labor laws, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, to prevent fraud and protect your business.

The flexibility of Workforce.com’s software and mobile app helps you track your employees’ time easily from wherever you—or they—are. If your employees aren’t tied to a retail location, you can use GPS to track their location remotely, see if they’re on the job or somewhere they aren’t supposed to be, and set restrictions for clocking in or out on the job site.

Easy oversight from a computer or mobile device

With these tools, you can have detailed oversight of your employees’ digital time cards, whether you’re at your desk or on the move. Workforce.com’s platform allows you to easily see who’s nearing their maximum working hours for the week, who is nearing overtime hours, easily swap employee shifts should the need arise, and know at a glance what staffing levels are optimal.

Make tracking and calculating employee time cards easy

Time and attendance software takes the headache out of calculating time cards for your employees, resulting in more accurate payroll spending while making employee scheduling easier. Workforce.com has automatic systems in place to help you streamline your processes, save time, and protect your bottom line. Book your demo today.

Workforce.com is a leader in Employee Scheduling on G2

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What are workforce.com shift simulations?

Would you still have those times where no one had anything to do because it was dead quiet? Could you avoid negative experiences for customers required to wait due to understaffing?

Instead of throwing 100’s of staffing, shift, and customer demand numbers in front of your managers and expecting them to understand what they mean, The workforce shift simulation plays out their day of operations for them in a way they can see and understand. It’s more like a movie than a spreadsheet. 

Introduction to the research, Multi-Agent Simulation-Based Analysis for Restaurant Service: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212827119301581

In 30 seconds, managers watch how their day will play out in front of them. The consequences of the schedule they build and the anticipated customer demand is spelt out visually, based not on complex equations and quantitative inputs, but by a set of simple rules that anyone can observe in both employees and customers.

Most importantly, they can then adjust the inputs to improve the outcome for things like customer wait time, employee fatigue, and overstaffing leading to substantial results and superior performance.

What impact will the 5% discount will have across the business? If a promotion increases customers by 5%, but gross profit by 1%, will we be better off?

Today, most of these decisions are made using linear models with spreadsheets. However, businesses are complex systems, and every change impacts another. Shift simulation allows businesses to model the impact each strategy will have on each business unit, present it in a simple format for front-line managers and empower better decisions.

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How to remove the stress from shift trade planning

An employee requests shift cover using Workforce

For many managers, the option for workers to swap their shifts can seem like a recipe for chaos. You create a schedule that does everything you need and letting employees tamper with perfection can only make it worse. Except that’s not true—and in a forward-thinking company, approaching shift swapping with the right managerial mindset not only makes your life easier, it means happier workers who are less likely to churn unexpectedly.

Follow these steps to ensure that shift trades work for your company.

Care about shift trade planning

The first and most fundamental change has to come from the top. Ditch the skepticism, stop viewing shift trades as a combative interaction, and understand the ways that a properly managed shift trade policy will benefit the company.

Poorly handled shift trading, or shift trades that are granted rarely and grudgingly, can result in the loss of managerial confidence in staff, loss of respect for management, and in the worst-case scenario, patchwork schedules that leave you understaffed with no fall-back plan.

Fail to take shift trading seriously, and you risk:

  • Experience gaps where workers end up filling shifts they are not qualified to perform, leading to systemic inefficiency.
  • Needless expenses if you lose track of your costs, trading workers who are on different hourly rates or are working overtime.
  • Lost productivity if the most experienced staff aren’t on the schedule for key periods.
  • Poor morale if trading shifts is chaotic, leading to employees calling in sick or simply quitting rather than navigating your schedule.
  • Staff resentment if some workers take advantage of shift trades while others are not able to.
An employee requests shift cover using Workforce
The Workforce mobile app allows employees to make a shift change requests quickly and conveniently.

Almost all shift trading problems are the result of an outdated employee scheduling system. Shockingly, out of 740 companies surveyed in the latest Workforce.com Management Survey, almost a third still used paper and pen to schedule staff. Of course the prospect of shift trades seems daunting when rearranging shifts means writing them all out again by hand.

The long-term pitfalls are clear. Harvard Business Review studied a grocery store where the manager often ended up at the register because their inflexible labor model meant people simply didn’t show up for inconvenient shifts. Yet the benefits are just as apparent: Manufacturing Business Technology reports a case study where automating the scheduling system at a Midwest manufacturing facility produced a savings of almost $5 million over three years.

Create a shift trade policy

Once attitudes to shift trading are settled at a managerial level, it’s time to set the rules for everyone. Make them clear, fair, and accessible, and apply them equally.

The key things to address are:

  • How much notice does the company promise to give employees for upcoming schedules? Depending on where you do business, this may already be a legal requirement under predictive scheduling laws.
  • What is the timeframe in which employees can request a shift trade?
  • Make it clear that trades are not guaranteed to be approved.
A manager uses Workforce to offer an available shift to an employee
Managers can use Workforce to make open shifts available for any employee’s available to trade.

A good shift trade policy imposes structure and clearly details the responsibilities for both the company and employees. Everyone knows what is allowed and expected, which in turn leads to happier and more productive workers. Research carried out for the Staples Advantage Workplace Index found that not only do 35 percent of employees want more flexibility in their schedules, almost half now say that flexibility is their top priority when job hunting.

Think strategically when approving trades

Knowing the best time to allow shift trading will make a big difference in how effective it is. Josh Cameron, Workforce.com’s Chief Strategy Officer, explains: “Shift trading is ideal for later changes to shifts that are caused by an employee needing to change the shift they’ve already accepted. Managers should consider encouraging the use of shift trades in any situation that is employee created, where other workers might be more likely to pick up a shift for their absent friend.”

It’s important to remember that allowing—and even encouraging—shift trading does not mean entirely delegating control of scheduling to employees. What is temporarily convenient for two workers may not work for their department or the business as a whole.

Managers should consider all the potential impacts when approving shift trades, taking into account the specifics of the employees in question.

  • Do their roles or skills match up? A trade won’t work if the shifts in question require specific skillsets. Allowing a waiter and bartender to swap shifts may not be a great idea.
  • Do the shifts overlap? Be careful when approving trades between shifts that don’t line up, or you can easily create a dead spot in the schedule with nobody working.

To do this, you need complete visibility across your workforce. This is particularly important for companies using Excel or other spreadsheets to organize their schedules. Spreadsheets are not designed for staff scheduling, and since a reported 88% of all spreadsheets contain human errors from the way they were set up, any discrepancies still need to be spotted by managers.

A manager uses Workforce to accept or decline a shift trade reques
Using Workforce gives managers the ability to approve and reject shift trades whenever and wherever they happen.

Empower employees with accessible information

The best shift trading system in the world is worthless if changes to schedules aren’t easily accessed and understood by everyone. Clear communication is essential in making the system work.

Employees need plenty of notice of when, where, and who they’ll be working with so that they can request shift swaps in time to be implemented. Managers also need to have long-term clarity on who is working and when, allowing them to plan shifts effectively and approve any shift trades with all the relevant data at hand.

This is another reason why managing schedules, let alone shift trading, using spreadsheets or pen and paper systems is becoming dangerously outdated. Communicating changes to individual staff becomes a chore if it means printing and distributing new paper timetables or emailing files that may change again by the time they are opened.

Don’t do it all yourself

Manually managing a modern shift work schedule is possible, but it requires constant vigilance and is more time-consuming than it needs to be. Shift trading works best when using shift swap software included in a workforce management solution like Workforce.

For managers, automated scheduling software means that shift trading can be accommodated without disrupting more important tasks, while employees see that their needs are taken seriously and decisions are carefully considered. Incompatible staffing and conflicting shifts are automatically flagged before schedules are finalized, and changes are automatically communicated to everyone in question.

Companies that embrace staff flexibility are more productive and efficient, and implementing it doesn’t have to be stressful if you use the right tools. As a manager, you have more than enough things to worry about—shift trading shouldn’t be one of them.