Ento can help you avoid a great deal of staffing pitfalls that come with the territory of operating in the restaurant industry. On our website we have some great resources for best practices when it comes to rostering for hospitality, and here we want to show how small differences in settings and practices can add up to big differences in time spent rostering or chasing employees.
Getting Areas & Roles right
Running across several sites, or just the one labour of love? Do you roster centrally, or does each manager do the roster for their store? The size and scope of your restaurant or restaurants is a prime consideration when setting up Areas and Roles in Ento.
If you only have the one location, Areas can be setup to more specific subdivisions within your restaurant such as Kitchen, Floor and Bar, with employee roles being defined under these areas. This setup can also be implemented under multiple Ento registrations if your business manages restaurants in multiple locations and if each restaurant manager creates the roster for their area.
Alternatively, If you are rostering centrally for several restaurants, each physical location can be entered as an Area on one Ento account, with employee roles being grouped under these areas. Role descriptions can indicate further subdivisions particular to a certain restaurant.
Customise Alerts to keep within legislation
Federal, State, Local and Industry specific legislation all dictate how to lawfully roster hours for your employees. Be sure to review where your restaurant stands, and then adjust your Company Settings (maximum hours per roster, maximum consecutive days worked and minimum hours between rostered shifts) to get Ento to automatically generate alerts if you happen to roster outside best practices.
Tweak staff permissions to best suit the management style of your business
Some restaurants operate like a tight-knit family, while others may need a little more management hands-on. It’s important to set your permissions to reflect how closely you manage your employees.
If you are confident with your staff members’ abilities to organise amongst themselves, you can allow them to swap, drop and pickup shifts and submit leave requests without management intervention. Or, if you follow a more hands-on management style, you can authorise these actions yourself, or even disable the option to engage them completely from the Company Settings screen.
Define your Publishing style…
Do you want to know to whom all shifts are allocated before you release the roster, or are you comfortable with staff being able to pick up shifts after roster publication? Ento gives you option to release your roster with unallocated shifts if you are confident that your staff will self-organise. Simply enable staff to pick up shifts from the Company Settings page, then go ahead and publish those unallocated shifts. Staff can log in and assign themselves with or without your permission depending on how you want to set it up.
… and use the Fill-in Finder and Shift Reminders to help cover shifts
Turning on shift reminders in Company Settings will send an SMS or email to staff due to work the following day, and if there’s a night-before dropout, or just an unstaffed shift that you’re getting a little anxious about, you can advertise the shift to all or certain staff members using the Fill-In Finder. Don’t forget to set whether you want staff to receive messages after hours or not, depending on the situation!
If you adjust your settings and practices in Ento to the context and management style of your restaurant, everything just goes a whole lot smoother!
