[Industry Tip] How to Best Manage F&B Staff When Economy Starts to Recover?

Under the coronavirus pandemic, the number of confirmed cases has gradually declined. People do not want to stay at home on holidays or on weekends. Shopping malls, Lantau Island, Cheung Chau, etc. are the new hot choices for going out for fun this year. In addition to those popular places that are full of people, there are also long lines in front of the restaurants.

With the relaxation of the social-distancing measures, many people choose not to go to the restaurant for one or two months for safety. Now, they finally can have dinner and drink with friends. The business of restaurants has increased significantly, and with the revived business, the employer needs more employees to work.

Restaurant owners should know how to be well prepared for business recovery. No matter whether you hire new employees or ask regular employees to work overtime, you also need a set of standardized management methods to handle the changing environment before the explosive increase of customers.

Create flexible shifts to arrange employees at any time

Divide the staff into different groups and work at different times. During the off-peak period, less staff can be arranged for the preparation work before the peak time and the cleaning work after it. Grouping the staff at peak periods is the best practice.

Many employers use paper or excel to create shifts, but it is easy to repeat the shifts or arrange the wrong shift because there is no alert. Some employers have changed the shift of their employees and forgot to notify them. As a result, no one went to work the next day. Therefore, it is suggested that employers find a rostering system that can connect the information with employers and employees, then employees can instantly know their new shifts or working hours.

Clock in/out is a must

Busy work, overtime is very common, but if you hire hourly-paid and daily-paid employees, overtime payment can not be in arrears! Of course, the best way is to have a third party’s evidence – attendance and clock in/out records, so that staff will not cheat on the overtime hours and require the employer to pay more.

For restaurant staff, employers can choose QR code or Bluetooth for time tracking. That is to say, the store supervisor/manager can see the staff clock in/out. If using Bluetooth, which is of high accuracy, staff must enter the shop to clock in. The attendance data can also be automatically calculated by the system to save employers a lot of time to check manually.

Create 418 rules report to make sure employee’s benefits

I believe every employer knows the 418 Rules. Whether or not an employee who fulfills 418 rules depends on the working hours and days, which is closely related to the shifts and attendance mentioned above. Therefore, employers need to have a form to record which employees will fulfill 418 rules and which employees have fulfilled the 418 rules. Though the catering industry has a high turnover, with the help of an automatic 418 rules report in an attendance system could be your good helper.

The work for the boss, the employer, and HR is not to record the attendance every day. You need to pay more attention to employee relations or employee career paths. The purpose of Workstem, a human resource management system, is to help employers deal with trivial and administrative jobs so that you can have more time to expand your business.

There are different clock in/out methods, scheduling functions can be highly customized by yourself, 418 rules reports, and all payroll related data will be calculated in the payment. One platform can handle all HR processes!

Read More: Is Unpaid Leave Legal In Hong Kong – Covid 2023 Update

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