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holiday or high season’s approaching – will you be ready to
serve? Having the right type and amount of personnel
during these periods will weigh on how well you perform.
The following thoughts will help ensure you’re ready for a rush.
Staffing up for busy times
Many restaurateurs need to plan for periods of high and low
traffic throughout the year. Those times are often determined
by factors such as marketplace and geography.
Dana Clark, Ph.D., director of the Hospitality and Tourism
Management Program at Appalachian State University in
Boone, North Carolina, explains that in the coastal Southeast,
restaurants near the beaches boom June–August and on the
weekends during May and September.
“Because summer is so busy here, a staffing strategy is to employ
college students on break,” he said. “Some may have started
working in restaurants while in high school and might return to
those places while back home. Others aren’t far from the beach
communities where they’re in demand.”
Many college hospitality programs require an internship
as well, making college students an accessible resource for
restaurants. Teachers off for the summer are other good
candidates. Because of their work schedules, firemen may also
help to cover peak hours.
According to RestaurantOwner.com, managers can
overcompensate by simply adding extra staff to ensure they’re
covered when they think they’ll be busy. Overstaffing can drive
up labor costs and create a loss of focus.
Understaffing, on the other hand, can lead to burn-out, more
waste due to error from stress and distraction, and a negative
guest experience.
Rather than adhering to a repetitive schedule, restaurant
managers can write each week’s line-up according to
projected daily sales based on historical customer counts.
A good way to track such data is through the restaurant’s
point-of-sale (POS) system. Even some basic cash
registers can record this information.
“Many hotels and restaurants have management systems with
algorithms that help determine when they’ll be busy or slow,”
Clark said. “Two- or three-year patterns will be analyzed, and
the systems are getting even better at predicting trends.”
Once patterns are identified, managers can plan to hire enough
peak staff so that total hourly labor costs represent around 25–
30% of total sales.
Staff ing
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GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR BUSY SEASON
EMPLOYEE HIRING
Article appears courtesy of national Restaurant Association /
“The key to successful holiday and seasonal
staffing is forecasting how many guests you’ll
serve during any given week, day or shift.”
