Running a restaurant has never been an easy task: aside from the challenge of cooking wonderful meals, food and labor costs have always been high, and today’s foodies have a wide range of restaurants and food trucks to choose from. Thankfully there are new tools which give your operations a boost that can really help, such as employee scheduling software.

Read on to learn more about how it works.

Save Time and Money

As its name suggests, employee scheduling software is specifically designed to help restaurants create schedules in up to 80% less time than it would otherwise take. Creating a schedule that works for everybody can otherwise be a very time-consuming and frustrating task.

Restaurants need to know that they’re always fully staffed, and with so many different kinds of employees such as waiters, bussers, cooks and more, it can be difficult to sort out so many moving pieces. The time saved can reduce labor costs by as much as three percent, which is important since labor costs are usually one of the largest drains on a restaurant’s finances.

For those wondering how to get a job at a restaurant which uses the latest software, here are some tips that will help you in your quest.

Feedback from the Frontlines

Anybody running a business needs to know how every aspect of the operation is running, and employee scheduling software makes it easy for managers and executives to get this knowledge at a glance. In addition to vital statistics underlying the restaurant’s operations such as total sales or labor costs, there’s also a space for each employee to describe in their own words how they think each shift went.

This allows decision makers to get both hard data about how the restaurant is running and perspective from your frontline staff’s eyes and ears, a combination which gives a true and full picture.

Streamlined Communication

Modern communication can sometimes be a double-edged sword: on the one hand we have incredibly powerful tools that let us easily keep connected from anywhere in the world, but sometimes the increase in communications can be needless and time consuming.

Employee scheduling software is designed to give you the best of both worlds. Employees can chat with each other individually or in whatever group message configuration is needed, and can inform their managers of their work availability by an intuitive drag-and-drop schedule. Managers can give their approval remotely, making the entire process faster.

But if a manager needs to simply inform their team of something — for example, a new dinner special — they can send a one-way announcement. This tells the team everything they need to know, but doesn’t allow for any needless responses which could potentially waste your employee’s time.

The restaurant industry doesn’t appear to be becoming less competitive anytime soon, and running one will always be a complex challenge. Get all the assistance you can with today’s modern tools, like employee scheduling software.