There are numerous challenges that raise their head: random quiet, or equally super-busy days, planning of staff and management holidays and how cover shifts will affect cost, the accurate clocking in/out of staff (including breaks), the list is as long as you could care to make it really. The best course of action is to have well communicated strategies and contingencies in place and a well trained team that are pro-active in stepping up to meet those challenges.
How do you train staff to make sure they are managing rotas properly?
As part of my weekly “rounds” I schedule in a site visit with each venue; these cover off anything they or we have picked up in the previous weeks’ trading and to look forwards over the coming month and what we expect it to bring. We follow a very simple structure for our meetings, covering 3 important areas of the business; the rota/scheduling and site KPI’s are included in one of these topics and we are able to discuss, amend or add in staffing appropriate to any factors that we can see coming up.
With their daily systems input, the managers are also asked to adjust the rota to reflect early/late finish times for their team, so they can track a true/real-time value of their labour cost at site. In terms of understanding the performance of their venue, the more information they have to hand, and the more accurate it is, the better their understanding and, we hope, the performance of that venue is. We held several pre-launch training sessions on our newest system, following the format of: 1) Demonstrate and explain, 2) Instruct and Guide (as they go through it themselves), 3) Take off the stabilisers (by which I mean allow the staff to run through the process themselves – with me behind them if they fall off.
The joy of our rota system is that it is integrated with the daily “cash-up” programme, so it HAS to be used every day; the more the managers use it, the more intuitive it becomes. In a very nerdy way, there are literally hundreds of reports we can begin to run off using this system (Polaris), that from an accounting and business point of view, are the equivalent of 50 Shades of Grey…or 50 Shades of Data.
As Yummy expands and there are more constraints on your time, how do you keep staff motivated?
We have some fantastic relationships with suppliers and also “rival” operators (you ARE allowed to have friends in this business), so we quite regularly organize supplier visits with our teams/dinners at swanky restaurants/brewery tours/trips to home countries of provenance etc. Why should we be the only ones to enjoy those benefits? Its our teams that are on the pub floor each day; how much more passionate would YOU be about recommending a lager, if it was you that had to been to Barcelona on a trip around their brewery? Or upsold a fish dish as you as the chef had been out for the day with the fishermen, so you WANTED to let our guests know how fantastic and fresh our fish is?
Alongside this, we have recently begun to award performance related pay surpluses to the management team's salary; We have chosen to call it performance pay, rather than a bonus, as the word “bonus” implies they are being awarded something extra; performance pay simply rewards them for following through on the key principles we want to see delivery on, and should, in effect, be awarded each month. It’s a case of a big slice of carrot cake (plus cocktail), rather than the old fashioned stick. We want our managers to be financially rewarded, but we don’t set ambiguous targets, or wipe-out their chance of achieving those payments should they be human and miss one or two targets; it simply rolls on to the next week. We are and always will be a people company; People first, product second. When there are so many similar operators out there, not to mention the monstrous corporate machines, we firmly believe that if you look after your people, your people will look after your business.
Ed's top tip: "Information, information, information…those of you who were at the BII dinner earlier this year, would have been fortunate enough to hear Sir Clive Woodward’s speech. As a Welshman, it chokes me to say it, but that really was one of the best speeches I’ve had the good fortune to hear (see what the World Cup brings though eh?) And it really does ring true; allow your managers as much information as possible. Train them HOW to use that information. Trust them to use that information to make your businesses succeed.