Here is a short summary of the steps you should follow to correctly manage your restaurant staff rotas:
- List all the tasks to be carried out
- Determine staffing requirements
- Write job descriptions
- Plan and manage shift rotas in an optimised way
- Find staff scheduling software.
1 - List all the tasks to be carried out
The first step in creating a staff rota is to make a list of all the everyday tasks that need doing.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of the tasks involved in running a restaurant:
- Kitchen and dining room cleaning and maintenance (floor, furniture, stoves, stands, etc.)
- Laundry
- Booking management and customer welcome
- Order taking
- Mise en place
- Service
- Collecting payment from customers
- Food preparation
- Bar management, if necessary
- Reception and unloading of deliveries
- Stock management and inventory ...
Next, calculate the time allocated to each of these tasks every day. In this way, you can be sure that you are covering your actual needs and not under or overestimating the manpower required.
2 - Determine staffing requirements
You can now determine your staffing requirements and the type of contract for each employee (permanent, temporary, casual, seasonal, etc.), based on the time required to accomplish each task. This will also depend on your restaurant’s capacity and its rush hours (lunchtimes or evenings, weekdays or weekends, school holidays, etc.).
As well as permanent staff, you should consider having to hand a list of casual staff agencies that you can contact to cope with staff turnover and emergency staff replacements (e.g. an unexpected rush, absence of the head chef, head waiter or a server).
