Most pubs and restaurants don’t have a labour problem. They have a visibility problem. Overstaffing rarely looks like too many people standing around; it hides in rotas built on habit, quiet hours carrying a full team and managers rota’d on top. Here are the five signs to look for, and what each one is costing you.
If this week’s rota is last week’s rota with a few names swapped, it’s built on habit, not trade. Sales move with the weather, bookings, local events, school holidays and the time of year. A rota that never changes means you’re paying for last month’s demand, not this week’s.
The fix starts with the forecast. Build each rota from expected sales by day and hour, then put people in to match. Some weeks will need more hours, some fewer, and that’s exactly the point.
The biggest leaks are usually in the quieter hours either side of your peaks: the first hour after opening, the gap between lunch and dinner, and the wind-down after the last rush. If the team on at 3pm looks like the team on at 7pm, you’re paying for hours the trade can’t support.
Looking at sales per labour hour (SPLH) hour by hour makes this obvious. A quiet hour with a full team shows up as a low SPLH, while a stretched peak shows up as a high one. Moving even one person from the quiet hour to the busy one can lift sales and service together. Our guide to calculating SPLH shows how to work it out.
We call this “plus-one management”: the rota is built for the volume of trade, then a manager is added on top. Because managers are salaried, they’re often left out of the labour plan entirely, but they’re still part of your labour cost.
You might have one person on the bar, one on the floor and a manager scheduled alongside them during a quiet afternoon. Count your managers’ hours in your labour figures and ask whether each shift needs them on the floor, or whether they’re spending it on admin that could be done elsewhere.
Front of house often flexes with demand, but kitchen teams frequently work fixed shifts whatever the covers. Kitchen and front of house rarely peak at the same time either, so planning them as one team means chefs standing idle after service while the floor is short at nine.
Back of house is where some of the biggest savings hide. Everards cut back-of-house staffing waste by 14%, without slashing hours or compromising service.
If your labour percentage drifts up month after month and nobody can point to the reason, it’s rarely one big mistake. It’s small inefficiencies every week: an extra hour here, a manager on there, a shift that never got trimmed. Without hour-by-hour visibility, they stay hidden.
It might not feel like a problem when you’re busy. But when margins are under pressure, every unnecessary labour hour matters, and the only way to find them is to see labour against sales as it happens, not at month-end.
A small amount of overstaffing adds up quickly. One extra person on for three quiet hours a day costs far more over a year than most operators expect, before you count the knock-on effects on morale, when good people are stood around with nothing to do.
Here’s an illustrative example, assuming £13 an hour including employer costs:
| Cost | |
|---|---|
| One extra person, 3 quiet hours a day | £39 a day |
| Over a week (7 days) | £273 |
| Over a year | £14,196 per site |
Across a multi-site estate, that’s a serious number for one habit. Across 128 sites in S4labour’s Operational Excellence programme, overstaffing fell from 32.8% to 27.9%, with an estimated labour saving of around £1,100 per site, per week.
Fixing overstaffing isn’t about cutting hours across the board. It’s about putting the right people in the right place at the right time. Connect your labour to your sales, look at it hour by hour, and move hours from where trade is quiet to where your guests actually need you.
The aim is a team that’s busy, well supported and in the right place, so guests get great service and every hour adds value to your business.
Compare labour hours with sales hour by hour. If quiet periods carry the same team as busy ones, managers are rota’d on top of a full team, or your labour percentage keeps creeping up without explanation, you’re likely overstaffed in some hours.
It depends on your wage rates and how many extra hours you’re carrying. As an example, one extra person for three quiet hours a day at £13 an hour costs over £14,000 a year per site.
Not if you do it hour by hour. The goal is to move hours from quiet periods into busy ones, so peaks are properly staffed and quiet times aren’t overstaffed. Done well, service often improves.
Weekly. Build each rota from that week’s sales forecast and check how the previous week’s labour compared with actual sales, by hour and by site.
Overstaffing is hard to spot from a weekly total, and easy to spot hour by hour. S4labour shows labour against sales as it happens, so you can see when you’re overstaffed, understaffed or scheduling the wrong roles, and fix it before it hits profit. Find out more about labour optimisation, or book a demo to see it with your own data.