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How To Manage Your hospitality Staff During The Summer Period

Across the country people are flocking to their nearest, favourite venues to enjoy the glorious weather. With temperatures reaching boiling point and the sun shining, customers are enjoying a cold beverage with some tasty bites in the sunshine!

While this presents an undeniably huge opportunity for bars and pubs, it also means that the pressure is on. If you’re left without cover or inadequate staffing numbers to meet demand, things could start feeling more chaotic than positive.

The right approach and the best tools for managing your staff during the busy summer period can allow you to maximise your sales, not to mention boost your customer’s loyalty to return again and again. Here are just a few ways you can make the most out of the summer season.

Posted 15/08/2018

Rota Management

Getting clever with your rota is one way to effectively manage staff during the hectic summer season. In order to meet demand with the right staffing levels, you’ll need to think carefully about where you’ll need the most support. For pub and bar owners, that means upping the staff numbers behind the bar and making sure you have enough people to take orders from the customer’s tables.  For venues with large outdoor areas, it is critical to ensure you have the staff to not just cover these, but ensure you are keeping wait times to a minimum and deliver excellent guest experiences.

Schedule the right people at the right times

While the UK starts to enjoy their annual summer holidays, it pays to think about who’s in your team, and what summer events or holidays they might be planning over the coming months. By taking their interests and holiday requirements into account early on, you can be sure to balance resources to meet your staff’s needs.

By doing this, you won’t just be raising morale within your team, but you’ll also be reducing the risk of staff no-shows... Take a flexible approach to avoid this, through encouraging shift swapping as well as planning around what summer events are on.

In addition, by better understanding, your team and their individual strengths means you can ensure that your best performers are scheduled to work at peak times during the summer period, in order to maximise productivity and revenue.

Have a backup plan

This flexible approach will stand you in good stead throughout the heatwave, but may need extra help to cope with unprecedented numbers on a particular day. The result of a hot day may result in customers staying longer at your venue for example. Or, you could be dealing with no-shows from staff on rota.

Whatever the issue, a good backup plan of substitutes will allow you to keep service levels at a premium. By creating a list of last minute or short-term staff, you’ll have support there when you need it. 

Be smart with software

If you want to get really slick with your staff management, use your hospitality staff scheduling software to your advantage. There are plenty of ways to maximise performance as a business during pressurised periods like the summer heatwave.

For starters, here are just a few benefits Access People scheduling software can offer:

  • Rotas designed to meet demand – using stored data on sales and performance, a predictive labour optimisation feature gives you a way of building rotas to place the right amount of people on shift as you need it. As complicated as that might sound from a technical point of view, you’ll simply be planning with the help of an intuitive traffic light system, giving you an easy view into where and when staff are needed.
  • User-friendly shift management for staff – the accessible software allows staff to view their shifts and request swaps all in one central place. They can also let you know their availability, helping you to plan that substitute staff list. And you can advertise available shifts quickly, and easily.
  • The right people in the right place – the secret to happy, productive workplaces is having the right people in the right place, at the right time. Analytics on software solutions like Access give managers an at-a-glance view of problem areas and days, so you can troubleshoot before things get out of hand. You can also plan around factors like the weather, with the integrated weather forecast feature.

Summary

Getting staff management right is a key factor for any well-run hospitality operator. During momentous periods like a summer heatwave, there’s even greater pressure to schedule staff appropriately. Do it right, and the reward is having an even greater opportunity to take advantage of the influx of customers looking to enjoy your venue.

A few smart, simple tweaks to how you manage staff can make all the difference. This, along with using intuitive HR software will enable you to streamline your rotas, handle staffing issues, and keep staff and customers happy.

Find out more about how Access Hospitality scheduling software can benefit your business now.