Simplifying Online Employee Scheduling for the Hospitality Industry

For the hospitality industry, getting the right employees in the right shifts at the right time can be a challenge.

It’s one thing if you have a small intimate staff at one location with 50 beds.

Add a food and beverage department, banquet and event staff, and a restaurant and bar—suddenly there are more pieces to manage.

In an industry where managing labor is essential to a good customer experience and healthy bottom line, poorly managed employee staffing could translate to bad customer reviews or a blown labor budget.

For hotels with multiple locations, departments, and personnel to schedule, employee scheduling software may be the way to keep both clients and corporate happy.

Scheduling Software Helps Keep Customers Happy

There is a lot of competition in the hospitality industry, and customer reviews can be the difference between choosing your hotel, or the competitor next door.

Being short-staffed is a sure way to a lackluster review.

But it’s not just having any employee filling a shift—it’s getting the best employee. That means the employee who is qualified for that position, a good performer who shows up on time, and carries the right training and certifications to hold the shift.

For example, you don’t want a bartender pouring drinks without their TIPS Training.

Scheduling software not only helps you manage the qualifications and certifications for a shift, it can also help you identify your top performers, allowing you to create clear performance metrics and reward your top performers with more shifts.

Your clients want to be interacting with your top performers, too!

Scheduling Software Helps You Stay in Budget

First, when tracking employee schedules and time in the same application, you can create a variance report. This shows the difference between planned and actual labor.

Keeping a close eye on your budgeted vs. actual labor is essential to remaining within budget, or discovering the actual cost of doing business. This information drives everything from room pricing, to pay rates, to hiring decisions.

Second, when filling open shifts, you want to avoid scheduling overtime into your budget. This can often be an after thought when the emergency at the moment is filling the shift ASAP.

Constraints built into your scheduling software can show you instantly which employees are available to fill a shift without creating avoidable overtime.

Scheduling Software Gives You Greater Accountability and Employees Greater Autonomy

A recent problem one GM shared with me was that she had difficulty holding employees accountable to showing up when they’d undergone a schedule change.

She shared, “They wouldn’t show up after missing a shift and say ‘Well, I never got the email or didn’t check my voicemail,’ and there wasn’t much I could do to hold them accountable.”

With scheduling automation, there are abundant ways of communicating schedule changes to employees, from pop-up notifications on their smart phones, to SMS text, to email. Open shifts can even be offered for first-come-first-served availability. You aren’t restricted to a printed sheet on a wall to communicate your shift assignments.

In fact, the mobile engagement and ability to swap shifts or request coverage from their phones are some of the features employees enjoy most in an online scheduling app. With 90% of Americans (and 95% of Millennials) having smartphones, employees enjoy the ease and flexibility of easy shift adjustments. It means a lot for people coordinating childcare or working multiple jobs.

Furthermore, administrators can maintain the same oversight of the scheduling and coverage request process without having to be directly involved.

Looking for Simpler Employee Scheduling?

To learn more about Benetech’s Advanced Scheduler and how it can help you simplify employee scheduling, click below and learn more today.

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