#1 Mastering Slack Series – 2 min read

Welcome to the Slack Master mini-series

Insights and tips to master your shift slack and better manage labour costs.

The wasted labour budget

“We know we are wasting some of our labour budget, we just don’t know which bit.” 

If you have ever walked into one of your sites and thought that there are too many people on shift, or surprised to see a team member standing chatting to another, you are observing what we call slack. This is the number of people on the rota above the amount needed to deliver the agreed service levels.

The problem many operators have is knowing where in the rota this slack is. You can look at last week’s labour and sales data and think you had a pretty good labour ratio, but you may have had some customer complaints, or you found your sales aren’t growing as quick as you would like.

The truth is, you need to know on an hour-by-hour basis where you were over staffed and understaffed – or as we call it, your slack and stress hours. With clear line of site of hour-by-hour labour spend vs required labour spend, you and your teams can effectively measure how many hours were wasted and, more importantly, do something about it.

The next on the Slack Master Series: #2 When life gives you lemons.