Having the right number of employees, or trying to run your business with less staff will hardly make sense if you cannot manage your restaurant staff shifts efficiently. This is especially important since restaurant staff shifts affect your staff performance. Having an irregular and inappropriate staff shift may lead to the underutilization of the staff or drain out all their energies which will ultimately reduce their overall performance and hamper the service of your restaurant. Thus managing staff shifts is of utmost importance. This holds right not just for the restaurant industry but for every industry in the world. Staff shift management has always been a crucial area of concern so much so that there are various applications, methods, and models designed for the same. In this article, we will discuss how to manage restaurant staff shifts effectively.

Things To Remember While Preparing The Schedule Sheet

While making the schedule for your employees that top things that you must take into consideration are:

1. While scheduling the employees make sure that you abide by the labor laws.

2. Clearly, state the working days and the off days of each employee.

3. Figure out what all roles need to be filled at different points during the day.

4. While scheduling the employees make sure that you don’t have a lesser number of employees than required.

How To Manage Your Restaurant Staff Shifts

Managing your restaurant staff timings is an art that many restaurant owners take years to master. If you want your restaurant staff to perform at an optimum level, then you need to manage their shifts accordingly. You must consider the busy hours of the day and the fact that your restaurant staff has a personal life as well.

1. Schedule Staff As Per Your Busy Hours

What if you end up having less staff during your busy hours and more than the required team during your regular hours? This will not only put excessive pressure on your staff, and reduce their efficiency; it will also play a significant role in reducing the scope of bolstering the profits of your restaurant. For example, if you have a cafe and you tend to attract more customers during the breakfast hours, then it is advisable for you to keep more staff in-house during these hours instead of scheduling their timings during dinner or lunch hours.



If you are not sure about which time of the days are busiest, then your POS system can come in handy. Since your POS will be able to tack transaction activities throughout the day, so you can pull out the graphs and see when your traffics is at peaks and when they are low. Once, you have this information; you can strategically schedule your restaurant staff timings so that they get to experience all types of hours at your restaurant.



2. Mix Your Staff Timings

The first rule to effectively manage restaurant shifts is to spread your staff out evenly. Give equal opportunities for your senior staff and new hires to experience a mix of different times of the day. This will also ensure that everyone is adequately trained in all the various responsibilities that come with the different shift times. This will make sure that all your employees are capable of taking up any job role in times of an emergency.

3. Hire More Than One Manager

It is hardly possible for one single manager to handle and supervise all the operations throughout the day. Hence, it is advisable that you hire two co-managers for your restaurant. This will not only reduce a lot of burden for a single manager, but it will also help in increasing their efficiency.

You can keep two managers and delegate them to different responsibilities. One may handle the front end operations, and the other may handle the backend operations. It is always recommended to have a day manager and a night manager if your restaurant is open throughout the day.

Such a distribution of work will help your managers to be a specialist in that respective domain and they will automatically get more time to analyze how they can increase the staff efficiency in their sphere.

4. Staff Must Have A Work-Life Balance

Overloading your staff with extra work without realizing that they too have a personal life and they too need to rest is the worst thing you can do. This will not only frustrate your restaurant staff, which will, in turn, reduce their productivity but will also increase the staff attrition rate at your restaurant.

If you lose your restaurant staff, it will be a major setback. This is primarily because you invested time and energy, looking for these employees and then in hiring and training them and if they leave soon, all your efforts will be wasted and you will have to repeat the entire process again.

Keeping in mind how close-knit the F&B circle is, once the news of how your restaurant tends to overload employees spread, then you might stop receiving applicants for jobs altogether. This shows how important it is for you to respect the private life of your restaurant staff, and give them work shifts and holidays so that they can have a healthy work-life balance.

Scheduling your restaurant staff shifts is excessively important since unless your employees are happy and motivated, they will not be prompted to deliver a great service. In order to run a successful restaurant business, you should always show sensitivity to your staff and think from their point of view as well. Even if you have the perfect theme, menu, and offers in place if you do not have a proper number of restaurant staff your business can hardly blossom.