Deployment is a word that has been bandied around the hospitality industry for a long time. At S4, we invented it. But what does it really mean, what are we trying to achieve, and how do we become great at it?
In essence, all we are ever trying to do in hospitality is match supply and demand. Too many staff standing around is wasted cost and wasted money. Too few staff, and you deliver a poor guest experience – leading to comped meals, lost sales, and, at worst, unhappy guests who tell others and never return. There are only so many jobs the team can do to fill the time if you aren’t busy.
That’s why we, and others, pull sales data, forecast sales, and then create a sales profile to write a rota against. In many businesses, you see two daily peaks – lunch and evening – when people want to eat or drink. Our job is to have enough staff when it’s busy, and not too many when it’s quiet. Of course, there are barriers: shift lengths, minimum hours, staff availability, and skill levels. And it’s not just about matching supply and demand within a day – it’s also about matching the total number of staff we have at different times of year. It’s easy to produce the perfect rota for Christmas week, but where are the staff?
But deployment is way more than just having the right number of people, it is then about using them in the right way. Over the weekend, I visited a farm shop that had clearly done a brilliant job attracting customers. But as we finally got our coffee after the excruciatingly cold pumpkin making, it was fascinating to watch. There were queues out of the door but loads of empty tables. When you watched the staff, they had plenty of people, but too many of the people were neither trained nor managed. The coffee and cake line was riddled with bottlenecks. Half the floor staff were wandering around doing their best to look busy, but actually, were doing nothing. The managers were working very hard but ignoring the people wandering around. Perhaps they didn’t have time to train them, perhaps they didn’t want to, or perhaps they thought it quicker to do the job themselves.
Deployment is about having the right number of trained team, with the right roles and the right objectives for that role. A well-motivated, energised team member is infinitely more valuable than a poorly energised team member. Without this, as I witnessed on Saturday, chaos ensues.
So, the hierarchy of deployment is simple:
- The right number of people at the right time
- The right skills for the shift
- The right brief of responsibilities
- The right management on the shift
If any one of these is missing, the shift won’t perform as it should. And we all know the circularity of the difference a good manager, a well-trained person, and a well-structured shift makes. As the cost of staff goes up, the effort and energy we all need to put into training, shift management, shift briefing and the right number based on all the above factors can make a significant difference to the shift. I used to say that running at 25% slack was a good job. The truth is that if you invest in all the above skills, you get the number down to nearer 15%, and that makes a massive difference to the P&L.
And the reality is, we have no choice. With financial pressures mounting, deployment is no longer optional. It’s a commercial necessity.
