How should we be rostering our teams at Christmas?
Christmas is a welcome interlude between the depths of November and January. It is short-lived, but we typically have two objectives. First, to give the customer a great experience so that they come back, and second, to take in as many customers as we can and make as much money as possible for the quiet months ahead.
There is a real challenge over Christmas to find the right balance between team and customer. Many businesses close on key days to give the teams a break. Others, like me, try to keep going all the way through. We ask the team, and our returning students, to do as many hours as possible, recognising that hours might be a bit scarcer in January.
I have always argued that you can make more on Christmas day than in the whole of January if you are in the Christmas day lunch brigade and maximising those busy pre-Christmas celebrations and parties. Many of these companies can make well over 25% of their annual profits in this period.
Trading patterns and bookings vary so much during the Christmas period and rostering becomes a much bigger challenge.
Being able to see planned events and add staff when you are busy, rather than just evenly scheduling people over the day, is a key skill. It is also one that I think is often undervalued. A blanket increase in staff can often just waste valuable profits.
The key challenge here is finding staff, communicating with them, motivating them, rewarding them, and keeping them energised during their shift. We deliberately call understaffing ‘stress’, because this is the outcome when these things don’t happen.
One of the first questions I ask when we have beaten forecast by a long way is: how were the staff? A busy shift may mean great sales, but it can also lead to a demoralised team when sales forecasting and shift planning aren’t in play.
When you have a small team on, say 5, you can get away without a good shift plan or shift brief. As you start to grow your numbers, however, this is not possible.
On busy days, a shift plan may be the first thing to be ignored, or not thought through properly. This leads to failure in service and frustrations in staff. A poor, on the hoof staff allocation is no match for a well-thought-out shift planning template.
And that’s not all we need to consider. At the same time as wanting to avoid stress, we are often happy with any labour ratio over the Christmas period because it beats budget. That’s why we still need to be paying attention to our base and flex budgets. This will ensure that in our exuberance over a good sales line, we don’t just overstaff, particularly on the quieter days.
Here’s to hoping as an industry we have a great Christmas, deliver service which makes our customers want to come back to cover the inevitable tougher times in January.