Employees constitute a significant part of your restaurant business. Without their proper functioning, you cannot run a successful restaurant. They are like the backbone of your business and they need careful management. Furthermore, labor costs are the main component of your restaurant’s operating costs. Mismanagement of labor results in dissatisfied employees and high attrition rates, thereby incurring high labor costs. You don’t want to squander all your capital on your staff when you have so many other elements to focus on. Therefore, you need a sound restaurant POS system for better labor management.
This article highlights the ways a restaurant POS software can help manage your restaurant’s staff in a better way.
7 Ways To Manage Labor With A Restaurant POS System
Let us look at some of the ways restaurant POS systems can help in the efficient management of restaurant staff.
1. Staff Management
A restaurant POS helps the manager to manage the kitchen and the restaurant staff effectively. For example:
- You can track the number of tables covered,
- Number of deliveries made,
- Number of working hours covered,
- The total number of bills generated by each employee of the restaurant.
- You can monitor the attendance of every employee with the assistance of an external ESSL device.
Proper staff management is essential to track your staff’s performance and incentivise the ones who are contributing more than required to your establishment. A POS system also records the extra hours that an employee works and calculates the overpay accordingly. All these features combined work to better the staff management and ensure if every employee is working up to their potential.
2. Take Control
A restaurant POS gives you control over your staff as well. You can control the accessibility of your information to the staff. A POS allows you to restrict access by setting permissions for particular roles so that any sensitive information or customer data does not ooze out. The staff can ask for permission from the manager if they need access to a particular data. A POS system thus gives you the perk of securing your restaurant data and making it available only to those who need it.
3. Payroll Management
A POS system provides detailed insights into the productivity of each employee. This feature comes extremely handy when it is time for disbursing the salaries of the staff. The reports are proof of your employee’s contribution to your business. For example, you can note which employee is taking the most orders, has the least table turnaround time, receives the most significant tips, etc.
Further, a cloud-based POS system helps calculate each employee’s salary each day or hour, even for the employees working in different outlets of your brand. With the help of an efficient POS, all the manual errors are eliminated, giving the employees the pay they deserve.
4. Labor Forecasting
Imagine having an event on a Friday, and you are understaffed. How would that work out? Guesswork may not be very reliable in such situations. Here’s when POS systems come into the picture, to tell you how to be judiciously staffed every other day. You can use your POS to set the total guest count, payment methods, total tables booked, etc., on a particular day or a shift to prepare your kitchen and dining staff for any event.
Being better prepared for an event is always better than being understaffed. Similarly, being overstaffed on days that do not require employees will only cost you more and increase the labor cost. Labor forecasting is thus essential, and a POS system helps you do the same.
5. Better Communication
Communication is the key to better restaurant management. Lack of proper communication can lead to delayed table turnovers, order discrepancies, and other issues that might have a destructive impact on the customer experience.
A restaurant POS system helps keep the front and back of the house in resonance with efficient communication involving table management, delivery services, etc. All of this works together to build a better team and satisfy the customers to their full potential.
6. Scheduling Assistance
Many times, there are instances when a particular employee is not available to work for a specific shift. Communicating this to the manager sometimes gets cumbersome as the manager is busy handling the customers and other responsibilities. In this case, a POS system can keep track of the requests raised by the employees and save time and resources of the managers. You need not look over the workaround requests, off-shift requests, overtime considerations, etc.
If someone is off-shift, the POS would automatically create the schedules of the rest of the employees that the manager can access and view anytime and from anywhere. With the help of a restaurant POS system, you can cater to your employee’s requests and grievances and enhance their satisfaction levels.
7. Enhances Employee Satisfaction
POS systems are essential for every format, whether you have a fine-dine establishment or a coffee outlet. They help enhance the satisfaction levels of both employees and employers. The streamlined procedures quicken everything and save a lot of everyone’s time and resources. A cloud-based restaurant POS system facilitates every process in a hassle-free way, thereby decreasing the stress levels on the staff and the manager.
For the kitchen staff, the inventory management feature of a POS system proves to be an asset. When everything is in stock, even during an emergency, the team does not have to worry. In addition, a POS system increases the coordination between the front and back of the house staff, thereby providing quick service, eliminating errors, and boosting employee satisfaction.
High labor costs and scarcity of competent staff are some of the significant problems of running a restaurant. If not resolved on time, they can be the core reason for your business’s failure. However, by installing a sound POS, you can figure out better solutions to these problems by managing your restaurant staff astutely.
