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.

Using templates to rota hospitality teams

The use of rota templates in the hospitality industry can be divisive. They speed up the rota-writing process, but the risk is that the team become lazy and merely load a template and publish the rota. It’s quick and efficient, but not necessarily optimising the business and managing the labour cost.

For some, the idea of using a template rota has other drawbacks, including inflexibility, with staff preferences being lost in the mix. I am in the opposite camp. For me, the best way to write a rota is to start with a template, probably one that has been written with a lot of thought and refinement and at the nearest sales level below the target for the week.

For example, if you are forecasting a 25k week, you load the rota for a 20k week. Then, some time and energy can be spent refining that rota. You can adjust the kitchen team if someone is on holiday, find extra staff for that Saturday afternoon event, add someone onto a Saturday night to excel at service delivery and spend per head, and remove a few midweek shifts to meet the budget. Creating rotas this way gives assurance that you have enough staff to match demand and optimise business, whilst giving the flexibility needed for different occasions and different staff.

With improvements to the S4labour system, you can load template rotas by department with the team already assigned, or you can drag and drop the right people against the right shifts. You have visibility of deployment, and can stay on top of labour costs. Now, over 70% of rotas are written using templates, up from around 40% historically. Across the industry, operators are reducing rota-writing speed and refining output.

Opinion Piece by Alastair Scott

There are a few causes of the lack of improvement in UK productivity. Some research sites a lack of investment. Other research released recently suggests that working from home causes an 18% dip in productivity.  

We can’t afford to increase staff wages any higher, and our staff can’t make a return to a workplace they never left. So, what is it specifically that impacts productivity in our industry?  

Productivity is driven in two parts: motivation and engagement, and secondly, deployment. In any case, we can expect that when people are under too much pressure, service levels drop. That’s where technology comes in. 

Every hour of labour has a cost, but often, it does not deliver the same return in sales. Over the years, a lot of industry tech has worked towards rectifying this.  

The biggest changes to technology have been payment processes. Tapping a credit card is so much faster than changing cash. Self-ordering has also had a major impact, with lots more to come in this area, I suspect. 

Kitchen technology has changed less. The obvious move to using specialist machines to do the bulk of kitchen work has to be balanced against the loss of quality.  

It is early stages, but these innovations will take work out in bigger establishments over time. 

Work-reducing developments have led to a theoretical 10% improvement in productivity. But here, the rubber meets the road.  

If you only have three people on a shift, then a 10% improvement in productivity doesn’t allow you to save a team member, so no actual productivity is made because you’re not getting more done for less cost. It merely makes the job easier for the member of staff.  

How much can a team member deliver? Has it gone up as a result of technological improvements, or has it gone down because we can’t expect our teams to work as hard as we once did?  

The truth is that if we put our people under too much pressure then service levels drop. We fail to serve people at the bar fast enough; we fail to offer a second drink; we fail to get the bill down fast enough and turn the table; and most importantly, we fail to say goodbye. 

Shift productivity can be boosted by 25% with effective deployment. It’s about telling your team when you need them, where you need them and what you need them doing. The rest will follow: great guest experience, upsell, improved team engagement and increased revenue. 

So, there’s a real skill there, which is not asking our teams to work under pressure, but to match supply and demand as well as we can and help make our teams happy, fulfilled, and productive. That is when they work at their best. 

Thought leadership by Alastair Scott

When I ran All Bar One, one of the disciplines instilled in us was to send out a weekly e-mail to our team. We did it on Sunday to show to our teams that they weren’t alone on the day, even if we weren’t there in person. 

It was hard. Firstly, thinking of something to say that was either relevant, profound, or uplifting. Something that rallied the team but also made them better; something that highlighted different members of the team every week so that over time everyone felt special and important. And let us not forget the many from head office also copied in, who were probably more eager to criticise than to praise.  

But we all knew the value of some well-chosen words, kindly meant, to everyone’s spirit and enthusiasm. I have no clue how many times I failed or succeeded, or indeed how many times I annoyed my wife by heading off for an hour to the study every Sunday morning. 

Anyway, I have now volunteered to do the same thing in Propel. Every (other) week, I hope to share something that will hopefully help lift people’s spirits, improve their skill, or make them more determined. 

Since running All Bar One, I have become a bit of a labour management anorak. I see most of the world through a labour management lens. I look at team productivity wherever I go – whether I am on holiday, at a railway station or an airport, in a supermarket checkout, or of course in a hospitality venue. 

And what do I see? Often people with not enough to do; people who don’t know what else to do; people who are bored; people who just want the day to pass and then they can go home. 

But when I see people who are engaged, working hard, who know what their purpose is and who seek work and see the customer, service is a joy to watch. This summer I have been so impressed by the Jet2 team, always happy to sort your problems out, in stark contrast to the train teams at so many stations, who don’t seem to have any work today and God forbid try and help a customer.  

I have been impressed by Greek waiters making roses out of napkins. I have been really impressed by the people working hard in the security section at airports, who seem to have been more helpful and constructive than I remember.  

It has been a great reminder that we should always pay attention to other industries and other countries, observing their best and noting their worst, and resolving to raise our own standards where we can. Our only success in hospitality is when we offer great value to our customers. The value of some carefully selected words, a friendly smile, and some small elements of attention, are as important as the food and drink that go with it. And we forget or ignore these things at our peril. 

Paul Charity has kindly agreed to let me write a fortnightly column on labour management in Propel. Labour management is not just about cost control, although it is one of the critical elements of the job.  

Increasingly, labour management is about setting the right environment for our people to thrive. Not bored, but focused energised and loving their jobs. That is my purpose.