Why Your Restaurant Needs a Good Labor-Management System

Opening a restaurant is one of the riskiest – and bravest – ventures you can take on as a business owner. But if you’ve got the right location, the right menu, and the right attitude to make it work, then there’s only one more thing you need to succeed: a good labor-management system.

It might not seem like the most obvious requirement for running your restaurant – finding a really good chef or the best house manager might seem more important. But how are you going to find, keep and grow those employees without a solid labor-management system on your side?

Here’s why your restaurant needs a good labor-management system to improve your business.

Find and maintain top talent

With a quality labor-management system, finding great employees has never been easier. You can even create a database of applications so you don’t have to go through the entire job posting process every time you need to add staff. Plus, you can quickly and efficiently identify unqualified candidates when you post new jobs, saving you time and headaches.

Great labor-management systems even provide the ability to measure your employees’ satisfaction, which can help you identify problems that can contribute to turnover. And when your employees are satisfied and happy with their jobs – and they know you take the time to find out – then you will experience less turnover and get to keep that great talent.

Make scheduling easy

How much time do you or your managers spend creating weekly schedules? Making sure every rush is completely covered across all areas of your restaurant can be a trial even for the most seasoned restaurant veteran. With a labor-management system, you can streamline the process by automating a great deal of it. The system will know who works in which department, whether or not they have time off scheduled and if you have adequate staff for each shift.

That means you can avoid over or understaffing, and ensure everyone is working the number of hours they should be working. And less time focusing on scheduling means more time creating delicious dishes to bring in more customers.

Stay compliant with the alphabet soup

FMLA. OSHA. EEOC. COBRA. The number of different laws, policies, regulations and government agencies your restaurant needs to comply with seems to be growing every week. Labor-management systems make compliance a breeze across all these areas. Never worry about missing a new regulation or overlooking a change to an existing one again by having a system automatically track all the ones that apply to your business.

Save money

A labor-management system can actually save you money. With the rising costs of doing business, labor-management systems help you monitor the things that cost you more than your suppliers do: finding and training new employees due to high turnover, overstaffing or understaffing due to poor scheduling, and fines due to missed regulations.

Seems pretty straightforward now, doesn’t it? Make sure your restaurant gets a labor-management system in place before your next dinner shift.