Tempted to template?

by | Oct 16, 2023 | Thought Leadership

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.

Other Articles You May Like...
One Shifters

One Shifters

We are a diverse industry in every way. With a licensed trade market of around 100,000 sites, and a licensed market of another at least 100,000 outlets, we are massive. We have sites in every town, many villages, and in most communities; whether we are a morning...

read more
Hospitality Sales See Solid Growth in April

Hospitality Sales See Solid Growth in April

Hospitality sales were up 5.1% in April compared to the same month last year, data from S4labour has revealed. The overall increase was driven by sales outside of the capital, with non-London seeing an uptick of 7.2%. Meanwhile, London saw a decline of 1.2%...

read more
Now is the Time to Get Better at Labour Planning

Now is the Time to Get Better at Labour Planning

This week, I had quite a disappointing conversation with an operator. He didn’t make that much money and lived above the pub, taking out around £200 a week. We sat down together and went through his numbers after April’s increase in national insurance (NI) and...

read more