Part 1 – Gaining Competitive Edge in Hospitality and F&B Industry – Why Workforce Management should be the Cornerstone in your HRM Strategy?

Introduction

Life in the hospitality industry never stands still, we all know it moves at a hundred mile per hour and continues to move at an accelerated growth. It is an industry where the experience and the feeling of the customers are put above everything else.

“When the customer comes first, the customer will last.”

-Robert Half

In this dynamic industry, challenges come from the need of adapting to constant change, from changing staff, changing competition and changing expectations of the customer.

The best hospitality businesses have to be those who stay ahead of the competition by delivering an exceptional experience for their customers, who are sure of their identity and who use every tool at their disposal to ensure the business is profitable.

Embracing technology is one of the ways hospitality businesses are setting themselves apart from their competitors.

Before we get started on how workforce management software will help you, we need to see if it’s right for you.

DO YOU:

 See a growing number of Casual Labour in your workforce?

 Get feedback on the complications of scheduling for your managers?

 Want to reduce the number of unnecessary Overtime performed?

 Want to reduce your labour costs through smarter scheduling?

 Want to spend less time on basic admin functions and more time doing the work you love?

 Want to make fewer mistakes and reduce your margin for error?

 Want to make better business decisions with access to better business intelligence?

 Want to empower your staff so they enjoy work?

We already have an HR System in place, how does it differ?

As an HR practitioner often dealing with HRM vendors, you might probably have heard them all. All of them offers a case for its approach to the market, the pitch can be 100% about the technology, positioning itself as a cloud-based provider since day one or even an option of software-as-a-service.

You might probably be using an HR System already to perform your daily tasks, however take a step back and ponder upon the solution that you are using. You will then notice that these solutions all share two key elements:

  1. There is no unification among the HRM modules, Talent as well as the Workforce Management.
  2. You are still spending a big chunk of your time managing the Casual Labour within your workforce manually.

Working in this competitive hospitality industry, you are already facing constant challenges -driven by the need to manage multiple locations and tight margins while eliminating data inaccuracies that pop up when using multiple systems. These types of pressures can make even the calmest person lose their cool. You need a solution that allows you to streamline all of these transactions so you can go from a Transactional HR Department to a Strategic HR Department.

The Challenge of Managing Casual Labour Workforce in Hospitality and F&B Industry

  1. Pay Calculation

One challenge for HR is arriving at the proper regular rate of pay for the employee if the two positions have different rates of pay. If, for example, an employee holds a regular full-time job, and also performs services for the same employer through a temporary casual labour task at $8 per hour, issues arise as to the proper rate of pay to use in calculating the pay. An integrated Payroll and Workforce Management will assist to eliminate any error when calculating the payment.

  1. The Schedule is Too Fluid That It Needs to be Done Manually

Whether you want to believe it or not, as the matter of fact, there are still thousands of businesses out there utilizing spreadsheets to schedule their employees instead of using a proper scheduling solution. We do not deny that they are in fact great for a lot of things such as recording, archiving and calculating data, however scheduling is an entirely different story.

Continue reading to find out Four Reasons Why You Should Get Rid of Spreadsheet for Scheduling

1. It’s Error-Prone

The fact that you need to enter the schedules manually and constantly update your spreadsheets makes the possibility of making an error even greater. It’s true that you can use formulas to calculate certain items, but if you make a mistake writing your formula, all of your data will be wrong, not mentioning that locating the root cause can be a daunting.

2. It’s a Manual Burden and Time Consuming

It’s a Manual Burden and Time ConsumThe biggest problem as mentioned by a lot of HR executives out there – it takes too long! Employees’ schedule is very dynamic and will be changing daily. Managers in this case are expecting to constantly edit their spreadsheets and sending out new ones to staff. It beats the whole purpose of creating schedules is to save time and avoid confusion.

3. Spreadsheets Can’t Be Automated

Due to the intricacies in scheduling, there won’t be any formula in a spreadsheet that can cater to it, on the other hand a Workforce management software will allow you to automate just about every process. Recurring shift patterns, request for shift change and posting time attendance to payroll can all be automated.

4. Spreadsheet is not Intuitive

Spreadsheet won’t be able to notify you when your employees have hit certain overtime hours, it won’t let you know any shift conflicts too. Basically, it all depends on the luxury of time you have to spare just to get your scheduling right with spreadsheet