The restaurant scheduling meets a wide range of criteria regarding working hours, rest and recovery hours, and the replacements that go with them. Managing schedules is a legally required step. However, which tool should you use to create schedules that are easy to use and share? Is Excel the most practical tool, or are other solutions simpler?
⚡️Schedule management in restaurants: an unpredictable task
Teamwork, the arrival of suppliers in the morning, replacements... a restaurant requires strong organization to ensure that the days run smoothly. The goal is also to ensure that customers are well served (with the hope of a 5-star rating). To achieve this, it is essential to implement an organization based on a method that is written down and communicated to permanent, extra, and seasonal employees, in the kitchen, dining room, and administration.
At least 8 days in advance, they must be informed so that they are more operational and organize their personal lives accordingly. Note that the manager is required to display the employees' working hours schedule in the restaurant. This precision and the timeframe for providing information are all the more important given that the shortage of talent in the catering industry is due in particular to the problems of breaks between each service and, more broadly, to the working hours.
But a catering schedule is all the more difficult to organize as the sector is subject to variations in activity, sometimes predictable in advance and sometimes not. In any case, it's important to plan ahead as much as possible to deal with setbacks and thus avoid last-minute schedule changes.
🤓 What are the elements determining factors of a catering schedule?
Above all, a schedule aims for the proper organization of a restaurant by respecting, balancing, and counting:
- Hours worked
- Hours of rest and recovery
- Cuts
- Night shifts
- Overtime
- Holidays
👉 Reminder of working hours in HCR
Catering employees, according to their collective agreement, work up to 39 hours per week, with a maximum of 48 hours over 12 weeks, and 46 hours for companies that have remained at 37 hours.
The HCR collective agreement also refers to absolute working time, i.e., for a single week, 52 hours for companies with a 39-hour week and 50 hours for companies with a 37-hour week.
This leaves employers with a lot of room for maneuver. But it is also a element of dissatisfaction among employees, who are precisely looking for more free time and fewer breaks between lunch and dinner service. Hence the importance of determining a balanced schedule.
In all cases, employees must benefit from 2 days off per week, whether consecutive or not.
🔄 How to design a coherent catering schedule?
To design a relevant schedule, both for the quality of the restaurant and the well-being of employees, you must take into consideration all activities and missions and then carry out the distribution of tasks precisely: in the kitchen, in the dining room, in the ancillary areas:
- Management of deliveries / suppliers
- Preparation of ingredients
- Preparation of dishes
- Service in dining room
- Takeaway service
- Reservations
- Taking orders
- Payment
- Maintenance
- Administrative and HR management
If you are new to restaurant management, you will need to learn these different aspects during training. For example, franchises provide it directly to their managers, who thus have a turnkey organizational method.
🤹 Annualization of working time in the restaurant industry
Due to the more or less intense periods of activity, the restaurant sector, like others, benefits from the annualization of working hours.
In a schedule, on Excel or other software, this allows all hours to be distributed fairly over the year, with a greater or lesser amplitude depending on the rush periods in the summer season and the quiet periods in the middle of winter (or vice versa).
Thus, as stipulated in the collective agreementafter agreement: "Working hours may vary over all or part of the year within the annual ceiling of 1,755 hours (companies with a 39-hour week) or 1,665 hours (companies with a 37-hour week) from the date of application of the agreement. »
🥇 The benefit of a quality schedule
At the work itself, you must add to your organization all the aspects of customer management and satisfaction which are, like your cuisine, essential elements of your reputation and your good rating on online review sites like TripAdvisor, The Fork or simply Google.
Note that a perfectly mastered schedule will improve the employee experience, which will have an impact on the customer experience. Mechanically, happy employees are more likely to be courteous and helpful to customers. This theory even has a name, , the Symmetry of Attentions©
📅 What planning tools are available?
Let's take a closer look at the planning solutions available, starting with Excel.
Excel, the hegemonic tool
Microsoft's Excel is part of the well-known Office suite, with Word as its primary word processor. The Excel spreadsheet is a very advanced calculation tool that can also be used simply to create lists. And it's for its versatility that businesses use it so often.
But it's primarily the most technically advanced people who manage to use it to its full computing power. Restaurant managers obviously don't need such a behemoth to create a schedule.
Excel and Restaurant Schedules
Like many restaurateurs or restaurant HR departments, you're looking online for an Excel template available for your schedule and calculating your hours. While this may seem obvious at first to get organized, this software quickly poses limitations if you don't know all its subtleties. Which implies:
👉 A time-consuming entry of hours, shift changes, leave, etc.
👉 A difficult collaboration: certainly, there is now a collaborative version on the cloud, but employees would still need to be equipped, which is not relevant in the catering industry
👉 readability problems in the long term: a series of tables quickly becomes difficult to decipher
👉 A complexity at the formula level: to use Excel even that at 50% of its power, you must follow training
👉 A lack of support: with Excel, a restaurateur cannot call on Microsoft to help him with his planning!
The question of counting hours and payroll in Excel
Necessarily, creating your catering schedule has the effect of calculating the hours and consequently adjusting the pay. All your variables (hours worked, hours not worked, overtime, rest, lateness, vacation, sickness, etc.) determine the final amount entered on your pay slips.
On Excel, once again, this type of calculation must be preceded by appropriate training. Added to this is the problem of data entry. It may seem trivial, but minutes put together represent a significant workload.
Thus, according to Salesforce, 69% of the most successful sales employees are those who have automated this time-consuming task, compared to 46% of the least successful salespeople. And for good reason, it saves time, allowing for better management of customer expectations.
👋 What are the alternatives to Excel for creating a restaurant schedule?
Yes, Excel is not the only solution for creating your restaurant schedule and calculating, among other criteria, hours worked!
🙅Why leave Excel?
Excel is a powerful software for calculations, but it does not only bring advantages in the field of planning. While it remains a benchmark tool, especially in small businesses, many others have understood, not its limitations, but its overly broad scope and its lack of support when needed in its sector.
Since applications have conquered smartphones and tablets, users are primarily looking for simplification and the fun aspect of software. For a restaurant schedule, this improves the employee experience and therefore limits turnover, which is so detrimental to the balance of a team.
For businesses and HR managers, managing a schedule other than through Excel is an opportunity to use cloud-based SaaS software that is easy to use and much more agile and collaborative.
So well that choosing to leave Excel is part of a real transformation strategy for the organization of your restaurant:
👉 Teams, increasingly young and often digital natives, want a management tool that will make them autonomous and allow them to interact with you for their leave requests, for example.
👉 Work organization and planning are simplified by a tool available everywhere and ultra collaborative
👉 Unlike Excel, you benefit from real support, especially if you choose a solution with experts who know your collective agreement and your constraints
👉 Cloud-based planning software is mostly customizable, allowing you to shape it according to your own obligations and your employees' expectations.
The 3 main advantages of a SaaS scheduling solution for your restaurant
- Access to schedules updated in real time for the comfort of the team and HR peace of mind
- Multi-channel communication: mobile application, computer, SMS
- Simplified and intuitive use with pre-established restaurant scheduling templates, automated on-screen calculations and a pleasant and modern design
Furthermore, like all cloud-based SaaS solutions, this type of scheduling and staff management software requires no prerequisites for installation or training. Better yet, you don't have to install anything: one subscription, secure access, and you're ready to go!
🥳 Consider Skello for your restaurant scheduling
Certainly, there are multiple staff scheduling software that compete with Excel. However, did you know that there is one specific one, available on computers, smartphones, and tablets, that is fully compatible with the hotel and restaurant collective bargaining agreement?
Best of all, Skello is customizable for both restaurants and accommodation solutions. This way, you benefit from a solution designed for your business and your employees, and you benefit from dedicated monitoring of your HR management and team management.
Faced with the problems facing the hotel and catering sector (staff shortages, attractiveness, schedules), Skello is fully invested in the design and continuous improvement of a suitable solution that allows for a better employee experience.
Through the collaborative aspect of the tool, it brings more flexibility and satisfaction to both parties. On the web or on the mobile app, it only takes one click to view the schedule and announce your availability, as well as exchange shifts with colleagues, which then facilitates the creation of the schedule.
In this way, HR retains control over the schedule, while taking into account the needs of employees. For the employer brand, this is a definite advantage for attracting talent in the kitchen and in the dining room. You can therefore offer a more flexible organization.
Note also that Skello allows you to manage the schedule of several restaurants at the same time, especially if you are the owner of a chain or the HR director of a franchise group.
For restaurants, as for all businesses, digital transformation also involves choosing easy-to-use and collaborative planning tools. In this respect, Excel is no longer an essential restaurant scheduling software, and you have everything to gain (performance, employer brand) by opting for a suitable solution.
