Restaurant Labor Scheduling: Essential Practices to Control Cost & Deliver Great Service

I've seen operators agonize over finding the best prices for supplies, repairs and other purchases, and a few minutes later nonchalantly whip together next week's labor schedule without even a glancing moment of contemplation or review.

In a way, preparing your weekly labor schedule is akin to filling out a purchase order for the following week's hourly labor. This makes your labor schedule the largest dollar-cost purchase order you have and it's one that affects not just your labor cost but many other important areas of your business as well.

Proper scheduling entails more than just organizing enough warm bodies to handle the daily workload. It requires foresight to anticipate staffing needs and a commitment to having enough properly trained staff to correctly execute the production of each menu item. An untrained or shorthanded staff will ultimately lead to higher product cost in the form of waste, customers returning meals, or inaccurate portioning. Even worse, the guest experience is negatively affected, resulting in decreasing customer counts.

Scheduling Objectives

There are three main considerations when contemplating a work schedule:

• Labor cost
• Level of service
• Employee morale