Scheduling the Right Hospitality Worker at the Right Time

12 Sep, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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As a manager of a facility that operates in the hospitality industry—such as a hotel, restaurant or meeting/convention center—you need to oversee a wide variety of workers:

  • Wait staff/servers
  • Maids and housekeepers
  • Chefs and cooks
  • Front desk staff
  • Bellhops
  • Meeting planners
  • Concierges
  • And many more

It’s not only your job to train these folks to do their jobs, but you’re also responsible for creating weekly work schedules for each and every one of them. Developing a staff schedule for one department is challenging in and of itself, but when it comes to creating 10 or more unique schedules every week, enough is enough!

If you’ve reached the breaking point with traditional paper-and-pencil scheduling, and you’re ready for something new, What Time Do I Work has the perfect solution—one that will save you time, money, and frustration, while also keeping your workers on track.

The idea is to create all your work schedules online with easy-to-use web-based software. This way, you can store all your employees’ names, departments, skillsets, emails, phone numbers, preferred shifts, and requested time off in one online location. No more searching for preferred shifts. No more lost time-off requests and no more misplaced contact information.

Using the What Time Do I Work online scheduling solution is proven to:

  • Lower employee turnover – Provide employees with the shifts they prefer, while also reducing scheduling conflicts.
  • Cut costs – Create work schedules in less time than when using traditional paper-and-pencil methods; for many clients, our advanced yet easy-to-use web scheduling software reduces the time required to create a weekly staff schedule by as much as 75%. You can also use the software to easily monitor (and reduce) overtime shifts, and automatically track labor expenses.
  • Improve employee relationships – Manage requests for time off and preferred shifts. And because all work schedules are delivered directly to your staff’s email or cell phone—as well as stored in the cloud—they are available 24×7. Employees will always know when they are scheduled to work.
  • Manage on-the-floor staff – Avoid having too many or too few workers on the floor, helping create a better experience for both your clients and your employees.

To discover for yourself just how much time and money you can save by using our online scheduling software, you can test drive it for free. There’s no obligation, and no credit card is required to sign up.  For complete information on our online scheduling software, please visit https://www.whattimedoiwork.com/features/.

Back-to-School Scheduling—Making the Adjustments

05 Sep, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As we are now in September, students have one thing on their minds—going back to school. That means shopping for new clothes, book bags, notebooks, pens, pencils, and all manner of “school stuff.”
For personnel managers at educational facilities—elementary schools, vocational high schools, private high schools, colleges and universities—going back to school means something a little different. It means creating work schedules that accommodate fluctuating employee availability:

  • Faculty and instructional personnel
  • Aids and in-classroom assistants
  • Executives, administrators, and managers
  • Secretaries and clerks
  • Technicians and para-professionals
  • IT administrators
  • Service and maintenance personnel
  • Food services
  • And many more

Your employees have busy lives outside of your school’s walls. They want to attend their children’s soccer games, ballet classes, and piano lessons. They need to take their kids to doctors and dentists. With so many employees and so many extra-curricular demands, it’s a constant battle to keep track of the requests for time off and preferred classes or shifts. Emails help, but not everyone follows that rule. You still receive some ad-hoc requests that all too often get lost or forgotten.
Rather than spend one more school year struggling with work scheduling, maybe the time is right to try a new solution that replaces traditional paper schedules with web-based online scheduling.
What Time Do I Work offers a comprehensive yet easy-to-use online scheduling solution that provides point-and-click simplicity. By storing all your employee’s names, emails, phone numbers, preferred shifts, and requested time off in one online location, we enable you to create a new schedule by simply moving time slots to the appropriate names on your schedule template. And if you happen to select a name for a time slot that the employee requested off, the software alerts you to the mistake immediately. To correct the error, you simply move the time slot to a different name. It’s just that easy to create a schedule.
When a schedule is completed to your satisfaction, click Send, and the schedule is automatically posted to the cloud and sent to all your employees via email or text. And because all employee information and schedules are stored in the cloud, they remain:

  • Available 24×7 to you and your workers
  • Protected against loss
  • Well organized
  • Updatable at any time, i.e., you can use an existing schedule to create a new one quickly and easily

For many clients, our advanced yet easy-to-use web scheduling software reduces the time required to create a weekly schedule by as much as 75%.
To discover for yourself just how much time and money you can save by using our web scheduling software, you can test drive it for free. There’s no obligation, and no credit card is required to sign up.

For complete information on our web scheduling software, please visit https://www.whattimedoiwork.com/features/.

Getting Over on Over Pours

29 Aug, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Getting Over on the Over Pours

Getting Over on the Over Pours

Patrons go to your bar to get away from their day-to-day life and be entertained in a number of ways:

  • Enjoying their favorite beverage
  • Chatting with friends and coworkers
  • Playing bar games

And if you’re lucky, you have one or more entertaining bartenders who do more than just pour drinks. They apply style and flair as they turn alcohol and mixers into works of drinkable art. This type of bartender is trained to:

  • Flip glasses behind the back
  • Flip bottles into the air
  • Nest bottles in mixing tins
  • Pour really high—which can also mean pour really long

And here we have the problem. The Long Pour. It’s fun for patrons to watch, and it keeps the crowds coming back for more. But it also costs you money. One long pour every night is nothing to worry about. But if certain bartenders pour long every time they perform crowd-pleasing stunts, then you’ve got a problem.

Eye in the Sky cameras can help resolve the problem to a certain degree, but there’s another way that’s much more effective—using scheduling software.

For example, let’s say that last Saturday night, your bar was packed with happy patrons—eating, drinking, hanging out with friends until you closed the doors at 2 a.m. You expected profits to be high because of the excellent volume of business. But when you figured out your pour costs, you found them to be unexpectedly high. The cost overrun was undoubtedly due to staff members’ long pours, but you had four bartenders on duty that night, so there’s no way to know who was doing what.

Here’s where scheduling software can help—by enabling you to look back at scheduling history. Simply enter the dates when you had high pour costs, map those dates to the employees who worked those nights, and see if any trends exist. If you find that John Doe is behind the bar every time you have high pour costs, then you know where the problem lies.

We know that running a bar is your expertise, and that using scheduling software might feel a bit out of your comfort zone. But when you choose What Time Do I Work online scheduling software, you’ll be amazed at how easy it is to not only create weekly staff schedules, but also compare costs with workers on the floor, as well as control overtime hours.

We offer a comprehensive yet easy-to-use online scheduling solution that provides point-and-click simplicity. By storing all your employee’s names, emails, phone numbers, preferred shifts, and requested time off in one online location, we enable you to create a new schedule by simply moving time slots to the appropriate names on your schedule template. And if you happen to select a name for a time slot that the employee requested off, the software alerts you to the mistake immediately. To correct the error, you simply move the time slot to a different name. It’s just that easy to create a schedule—and it’s equally as easy to create a map of pour costs to on-floor bartenders.

To discover for yourself just how much time and money you can save by using our web scheduling software, you can test drive it for free. There’s no obligation, and no credit card is required to sign up.  For complete information on our web scheduling software, please visit https://www.whattimedoiwork.com/features/.

Seasonal Scheduling Headaches

22 Aug, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Eliminate Scheduling Headaches with WhatTimeDoIWork.com

Eliminate Scheduling Headaches with WhatTimeDoIWork.com

Each season offers its own kind of fun. In the springtime, everyone gets spring fever and can’t focus on anything but getting outside after months of cabin fever. Summertime is great for lots of things—swimming, traveling, spending time with the kids. In the fall, kids go back to school and we look forward to apple picking and pumpkin pies. And with winter comes the holiday season with too much eating, drinking, and general festivities.

But no matter what the season, you face the same challenge—scheduling your employees’ time off. Even when three of your best waitresses and two hostesses want the same week off to participate in their favorite activities, you have to come up with a workable schedule that won’t compromise your business.

And let’s not forget the way your employees request time off for spring break, summer vacation, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas shopping—a quick “Oh, by the way, I really need to take vacation next week” called across the kitchen, or dates scribbled on the back of a meal check and pinned to your office door, or a message left on your voicemail. While all these fast-and-easy methods are great for your staff, they make life difficult for you because you have to remember everything from everyone, and then deal with it.

If you’re looking for a sure-fire cure for these seasonal scheduling headaches, why don’t you try a system for online restaurant employee scheduling? When you move from paper schedules to online schedules, you’ll save lots of time, energy, and frustration not just once, but every time you create a schedule.

Here’s how it works. First of all, employee information is stored in the cloud, where it’s available 24×7. You can store names, phone numbers, email addresses, shift preferences, vacation requests—anything you need to know about your staff. And you can update it or add to it whenever you want. Even better, your staff can also see the names, phone numbers, and email addresses for everyone else. So if someone scheduled to work is sick or has an emergency, they can find their own replacement rather than put the burden on you.

Second, online scheduling software is fast, easy and accurate. The software is simple to use and allows you to simply point & click an employee name into a time slot. If that employee has already requested vacation on that day, the online scheduling system alerts you to the mistake immediately so that you can schedule someone else.

And finally, you can post new schedules and schedule changes in the cloud, and automatically deliver them to your staff’s phone or email in seconds. Everyone knows when they have to work—no questions, no excuses, no worries.

The bottom line—online workforce scheduling eliminates schedule conflicts, saves lots of time and frustration, keeps everyone on the same scheduling page, and best of all, cures you from seasonal scheduling headaches.

If you’re ready to learn more about the benefits of online staff scheduling, visit What Time Do I Work today and test drive the free trial software.

Don’t Let Work Scheduling Become a Friction Between You and Your Staff

28 May, 2013 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Managers of hospitality establishments often face many challenges on a daily basis. Scheduling staff members for specific shifts and days can be one of the biggest challenges of all. Finding a happy medium between scheduling the correct people for certain shifts and jobs while also choosing the shift and days they are most happy with is an obstacle within itself. In many situations, work scheduling can cause animosity between managers and their staff when someone feels like they aren’t getting what they want.

Often times, staff members want to work a specific shift because of other commitments and would prefer to work certain days of the week. If too many employees request a specific day off, managers are stuck with the difficult job of deciding who has to work in order to have an appropriate number of employees working. Because of this, friction can arise because someone who originally wanted the day off will have to end up working. With scheduling software, managers can simply input information about which days an employee is requesting off and keep track of it on a first come, first serve basis. When the quota of eligible employees off on a certain day is exceeded, the system will inform the manager so no one else can request that day off.

Managers also have the ability to simply enter each employee’s availability into the system to simply and easily create upcoming schedules based on that information. Not only will the manager’s job become instantly easier, but any friction between managers and staff will be erased with the automatic scheduling of the system. If your company is looking for information on employee scheduling, visit www.whattimedoiwork.com.