Restaurant Scheduling Tips - Schedule for Success

Scheduling is one of the most consequential tasks on a restaurant manager’s plate, and often one of the least systematized. As a lever that directly controls how you spend about 30% of your business’s budget, systemizing its creation and building it with intention is extremely important, and one of the fastest ways you can make improvements to both the financials and the day to day operations of your restaurant. Systemizing it also will cut down the time you spend on what is often one of your most tedious tasks. To do this, you need to think through the right factors each week and pressure-test your decisions with the right metrics. If you do this consistently you will make incremental change and build real momentum that, over time, puts you miles ahead of the competition.  

Step 1 - Start with the forecast, not the schedule. Look at the following:

• Same shift, prior week

• Same shift, prior year

• Known variables - events, weather, holidays, competitor pressure, etc.

You don’t need a sophisticated model - make a simple spreadsheet with each day in column A, Last week’s sales in B, last year’s in C, and variable adjustments in row D. Commit to your projection of each day as a basis for how much labor you have available to spend.

Note for new restaurants without this data - make an informed, conservative monthly revenue projection, consulting with professionals, measuring against good benchmarks. This is the basis for you to determine your available labor budget, and in extension what your restaurant can or cannot do. It’s extremely important to get this right, as it will dictate how much you can pay your staff, how your staff prepares food, and how service operates to name just a few things. If you start off with more staff than you can afford to pay and a concept that requires that staff, you’re going to be backtracking and trying to pigeon-hole solutions that don’t work almost immediately. Have a realistic revenue number to aim for, and a concept and staff that can operate at a high level on at most 30% of that. 

Step 2 - Break your projections down further into dayparts. 

You don’t need the same level of staff on the clock from open to close if you do the majority of your revenue between 5 and 8. How you do this depends largely on the type of restaurant you’re scheduling for however, one size does not fit all. We’ll look at two examples, a quick service restaurant and a higher end full service cooking mostly from scratch.

The quick service has very predictable day-parts from a revenue perspective and more streamlined, simple prep procedures. They should not be exceeding their labor target over any given hour or day-part. If revenue dips to $100 / hour between 2 and 4, the schedule needs to reflect that. This could look like scheduling 4 employees for an opening shift at 10, then cutting as needed starting at 130, retaining just 1-2 past 3PM. You don’t want to see drastic fluctuations in labor % throughout the day, you should be consistently hitting the numbers. 

The scratch full-service restaurant can be a different animal. While you still want to look at day-parts and schedule them as efficiently as possible, most of your attention should focus on the overall day as a whole. Unless you have consistently high revenue and traffic from open to close, it is not going to be feasible to be under your target every hour of the day. The main reason is that the BOH is always working regardless of the volume of guests walking in the door. Say you open for brunch at 9 on Saturday. Your restaurant has high hourly revenue from 9-12, then it dips hard from 12-5, then explodes from 5-8 for a busy weekend dinner service. You still need to find places to cut hours in the afternoon, but trying to force the number under your 30% target means you won’t have staff to prepare the food you need for dinner service. You need to ensure that you’re scheduling efficiently and that any “high-labor hours” are offset by the busy hours when the percentage should dip into the teens or even single digits. 

If you’re having trouble determining which day-parts are hurting you and which are helping, use SPLH - Sales per Labor Hour - and compare across day-parts. Simply divide total sales by total number of scheduled hours in a day-part, and you’ll see where to make changes. 

Step 3 - Use your staff effectively and efficiently 

Without your staff and processes locked in, all of this planning is for naught. Your team is your most important resource and you need to treat them that way. That includes taking steps to ensure you have the best people possible for the benefit of your team at large, your customers and your business as a whole.

First, is your staff properly trained with clear expectations and accountability? your staff needs to understand their role and understand why you need to make the labor-related decisions you do. If staff feels punished or unfairly inconvenienced if someone gets cut, there is a leadership problem, and a brewing morale problem that will snowball.

Next, schedule to your employee’s strengths. One cook may be at his best executing on the line during service, while another can put her head down and knock out mountains of prep. Some bartenders thrive in the spotlight, creating an experience for your guests, others are technical and crafty and enjoy spending time getting the garnish perfect. By finding which members of your team thrive in which roles and scheduling them to maximize their skills, you can meaningfully reduce the amount of staff you need on the clock at any given time. 

Something else to always keep in mind - though this is a topic for a different post - is the importance of creating an efficient prep system. The same amount of prep could take 30 labor hours or 20 labor hours depending on how it’s being done. There is always savings to be found in your processes. 

4 - Consistency, Fairness and Communication

Building the right team takes a lot of time, effort and money. If your team is unhappy and feels disrespected, that will trickle down into every aspect of your restaurant and work against everything you’re trying to do. How do you keep your team motivated and working with you, while still maintaining a strong leadership position that allows you to make adjustments and changes for the good of the business overall?

Clear communication and expectations from the beginning are integral. Never make promises you can’t keep. Never make ambitious statements to try to impress a candidate into saying yes. It needs to be made extremely clear during the onboarding process (and in practice going forward) what an employee's schedule and hours will look like, what the request off policies are, how employees are expected to perform during their shift, and so on. For example, don’t set an expectation that a cook will get 40+ hours every single week if you know you sometimes make cuts in the evening. 

You must also be fair and consistent at all times, and clearly communicate policies that could be construed as unfair. For example, if you want your most seasoned, talented servers and bartenders working the best shifts, make it clear to new hires that they will not get all of the shifts they want right away, and lay out an evaluation system that gives them a transparent path to get better shifts. 

5. Build the Habit

Lock in a weekly cadence, build momentum, make real, incremental change. 

1. Forecast - Build projections, separate into day-parts

2. Draft against the forecast - Use metrics like SPLH if you’re unsure

3. Pressure-test - Verify your labor %, any overtime exposure and peak coverage

4. Publish - Maintain fairness and established policies if changes are needed

5. Review actuals - After week close, measure your projections, if you aren’t within 10% evaluate how you’re making projections. Measure scheduled hours versus actual, and projected labor versus actual - variances will tell you where to make changes 

   
   

Step 5 in particular is what separates operators who improve incrementally and bury their competition from the operator that runs the same playbook week after week and wonders why they’re falling behind. 

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Building schedules to this standard takes the right tools. Our new scheduling and labor cost matrix lets you build up to three schedules simultaneously - no more toggling between a template and a calculator. [See the scheduling tool → https://www.snyderhospitalitysolutions.com/product-page/shs-restaurant-schedule-labor-cost-matrix

If you want a deeper diagnostic on where your current scheduling and labor practices are

leaking money, the Health Check pulls your numbers, identifies the patterns, and gives you a clear set of fixes. $97, four-day turnaround. [Get your Health Check → https://www.snyderhospitalitysolutions.com/product-page/quick-health-check