“I think it’s definitely improved our guest experience…it’s a really helpful training tool” 

Running a multisite hospitality business means juggling a lot, from housekeeping logistics to breakfast rushes, and making sure guests always have a great experience. But when your team is stretched thin in some areas and underutilised in others, it’s hard to know where to make changes to your rota that will actually work and help you to keep driving guest experience.

Striking the right balance between cost and coverage, so you can maximise on sales opportunities without spending more on your labour is the ultimate goal of any Operations Director and General Manager.  

You likely already have a system in that is helping you to manage your labour just fine, but with upwards of hundreds of thousands of pounds in cost pressures since April, perhaps you are feeling frustrated with the amount of time and productivity you are getting out of your rotas. 

In order to drive performance and guest experience, you need to understand missed sales opportunities, reach beyond your current practices and align your tech with your unique business goals, which is exactly what Maddy Sinclair, General Manager of The Northey in Wiltshire did with The Operational Excellence Programme: 

“It started off by looking at our existing deployment, what we’re already doing, talking through the needs of the business, the different things that make the business unique. For example, eight of our hotel rooms are in a completely different building at the bottom of the garden.” 

Our team of experts worked with the teams on-site to help unify processes, deploy teams more effectively, and build habits that drive long-term success.

 “We did a walk round of the business with ourselves, head chef, head housekeeper, ops manager, S4labour, just to get a feel for what we were doing on a day-to-day basis. Then we looked at putting together base rota and a high sales week rota.”

 

 “It really illustrated a need for cross training. You are looking at your slack and your stress, and we had a situation where in the mornings our housekeepers were starting at seven, cleaning the pub, and then kind of waiting around for rooms to check out.

 

There was definitely a lot of slack there. At the same time, when everyone comes down for breakfast at once, it’s very busy. So, it was a bit of stress front of house. Those two things led us to cross training our housekeepers so that now for an hour in the mornings they help with breakfast whilst they’re waiting for the rooms to be ready. In the kitchen 10-10 is kind of the shift that the chefs do, whereas we’ve now looked at staggered start times. You don’t need everybody in at ten. You can phase it throughout the morning and it, it really helps to kind of have the numbers and the data to back it up when you’re having those conversations.” 

 

“I think it’s definitely improved our guest experience, particularly when the pub’s quiet. We’re always looking for how we can save labour when those sales drop and the Goldilocks numbers and that deployment graph have been really useful in looking at where we can afford to save labour and where we do need to prioritise keeping those hours in.”   

 

“There is more of an understanding. It’s a really helpful training tool, especially with team leaders or junior assistant managers that are still learning.” 

You’re an Ops Director in 2025 – which means you already know that managing labour cost isn’t enough. You might already have a wage system in place, but is it helping your managers understand their labour in a way that drives both cost control and sales performance? To improve profit margins, you need a labour strategy that empowers managers in every site with the tools to see exactly where they are spending money – and understand why.

Are your managers stuck with outdated systems, vague overviews, and ingrained habits that lead to inefficiencies? Maybe you’ve got kitchen porters clocking in at 10am, standing around waiting for work while wages tick up and productivity stalls. Multiply that across multiple sites, and the cost of poor visibility becomes clear. Without knowing where and why money is being spent, managers can’t make the right decisions — and ops leaders can’t drive the change that’s needed. Here’s how Robert Bridger, Thorley Taverns used S4labour to empower his teams, reshape habits, and transform profitability.

“The hardest thing in my job as an Ops Director is getting people out of those habits… We had a wage system in, but it didn’t give us as much detail as S4labour does.”

Slack hours build up. Stress hours go unmanaged. Labour is misaligned with demand.

“The main outcomes of using S4labour for us was to get our labour strategy correct…S4 can split it down to an hourly basis to show exactly where you are spending your money on your staff.”

Two years later, our system continues to empower Thorley’s managers, with hour-by-hour visibility of labour spend, giving them the tools to reshape habits and improve profitability.

“From an ops point of view, we can go into units and say, ‘you’re not spending your money in the right areas of your labour’…It really has empowered the managers in what they need to do and how they control their daily and weekly budgets.” “It’s definitely driven profits up because we know where to put our labour spend now.”

Every one of your sites is different. A community pub doesn’t operate like a gastro venue, and weekday staffing needs aren’t the same as weekends. S4labour doesn’t just manage labour — it gives your managers the visibility to understand where they’re spending, why, and how to align labour with trading patterns.

“Because we’re such a multi-diverse pub company, it’s really crucial for me that I can go into a community pub and see where they’re at and go into a gastro pub to see that they are not spending too much in the week and are saving up for the weekends.”

With S4labour, your teams aren’t just reacting to costs — they’re making proactive, sales-driven decisions that improve productivity and profitability. S4labour helps you:

• Align labour with demand, hour by hour
• Embed smarter habits across teams
• Reduce unnecessary spend
• Drive profitability through better decisions

“It’s really transformed us as a company…it’s definitely value for money for us.”

Ready to move beyond basic labour management? Watch Rob’s story to see how S4labour helped him reshape habits, empower his teams and transform performance across a multi-diverse pub company.