#2 Mastering Slack Series – 2 min read
What is a slack task and what is a fixed task
“When life gives you lemons”
How much time have you spent thinking about cutting the lemons recently? Not much, right? It’s a quick task that the same person does at the same point every day. It takes 5 minutes and costs you about a quid in labour.
How many of these 5 minute jobs do you have in your business? Lighting the fire, cleaning the menus, checking X, Y & Z are up to standard.
Naturally, we have dozens of these tasks in every shift, so we tend to group them together and call it an hour at the start of a shift and put two people on to do it. This hour or two of labour per shift adds up.
Better planning and healthier habits mean a lot (probably all) of these tasks can be factored into periods of slack time, i.e. when the demands of the shift lull for a few minutes.
Too much of what our teams do is regarded as a fixed task, with time allocated to deliver it. Moving these tasks to slack time can take vast amounts of labour time out of the rota.
The next on the Slack Master Series: #3 Moving from fixed tasks to slack tasks