Restaurant staff pouring wine at a table

Interview

Q&A with Jordan Boesch, Founder & CEO of 7shifts on Staffing for the Holidays

November 20, 2020

On some of the challenges that restaurants face and advice on optimizing staffing for the holiday season.

As the holiday season begins to ramp up, restaurants traditionally aim to bring on additional help to handle the increase in foot traffic. This holiday season, however, will require restaurants to think more strategically when managing their staff. With a surge in COVID-19 cases across the country, many cities and states are tightening on-premise dining restrictions once again. And it couldn’t come at a worse time. For restaurants, the holidays mark a time when sales boom, benefitting the restaurant’s bottom line as well as their staff. To get a window into the world of staffing, we spoke with Jordan Boesch, Founder and CEO of 7shifts about some of the challenges that restaurants face and advice on optimizing staffing for the holiday season.

What is 7shifts and how does your product help restaurants streamline staffing?

7shifts is a labor-management tool built specifically for restaurants to simplify labor management, one shift at a time. 70% of restaurants still make their schedules on spreadsheets or with pen and paper. Which is a huge waste of time (and money) for managers, and hard to share among a team. 7shifts helps managers build simple schedules designed to meet their labor targets. We also factor in employee availability and labor compliance so there are no surprise no-shows or fines. 7shifts adds communication to the mix and publishes the schedules for staff to view via our app. In-app, they can sync their schedule with their calendar, swap shifts or drop shifts, and chat with their team. This cuts down on 70% of time dealing with calls and texts during the scheduled time and gives managers and assistant managers 80% of their time back to help grow the business.

Another large component that 7shifts helps with is the communication and engagement aspect of your workforce. A disengaged employee is 4x more likely to quit than one that is engaged. To date, [managers] think of it as “fluff” or “touchy-feely,” but the reality is that it’s just hard to measure. We’re focused on unpacking it so that we can give new managers and operators the tools to keep their staff happy, engaged, and doing their best work. After all, it costs restaurants upwards of $3,500 when an employee turns over, so recruiting and retaining the right talent in restaurants is more important than ever.

A bartender at a restaurant wearing a mask COVID-19

How did you come to start 7shifts?

7shifts started when I was working at a few of my dad’s quick-service restaurants in Regina, Canada. While I was there, I got to see how challenging it was to make weekly schedules that worked — there was a lot of miscommunication around shifts, and a lot of sticky notes and spreadsheets to keep track of. The “problem solver” in me decided to build something that solved this pain point for my dad. I taught myself how to code and built a simple tool where he could upload a schedule for staff to download. It quickly grew into my passion project and around 2014, its own business. Now we have a team of more than 160 in Canada and the U.S. to help restaurants solve one of their biggest challenges: labor.

What are some common staffing mistakes that restaurants can avoid by being proactive and planning ahead?

One of the biggest challenges comes from over or under-scheduling. You may find yourself wanting to staff up for a streak of good weather, a holiday, a big game. If you do that just on intuition, the labor cost will creep up and eat any sales gains. You may also find yourself ill-prepared and understaffed if you’re too conservative with scheduling, leading to overworked employees and lost sales. It’s bad for your staff and your business.

Combining sales and labor data lets your team make intelligent staffing decisions based on historical information. Our platform takes it a step further and integrates local weather into the process so you can avoid having servers ready for patio seating that gets rained on. Being proactive and leveraging data can help make scheduling easier and your labor more effective.

What are some of the biggest challenges for restaurants during the holidays in relation to staffing?

With so many people traveling and taking time off during the holiday season, keeping track of employee availability can be a hassle. Leadership should encourage staff to submit and confirm their holiday time off early. With 7shifts, employees simply set their own availability from their mobile device for managers to approve. When a manager goes in to make the schedule, they’re going to have full visibility into who can work when. We’re also rolling out a Quick Fix tool that will recognize these availability and compliance mistakes like co-opening or split-shifts and prompt you to automatically fix them. By getting a jump on holiday availability, managers can minimize scheduling headaches and save themselves from “no-call, no-shows” during the busiest time of year.

Back of house restaurant staff cooking in the kitchen

With the emphasis on takeout and to-go operations due to COVID-19, what positions will restaurants need to staff up on going into the holiday season?

This holiday season is unlike any we’ve had in a long time, and a lot of the rules have to be forgotten in favor of the current health crisis. We’re looking at reduced indoor dining room capacities in cities like New York and outright shutdowns in the Bay Area, and the oncoming winter makes outdoor dining a less viable option. Those family and friend gatherings that have traditionally taken place in restaurants will see a transition to homes with food delivery or catering. Restaurants will need to make sure that they have enough staff to ensure that orders are packed with the food, drinks, and any other items, and properly and safely handed off to customers and delivery drivers. We’ve seen a near 51% spike in the number of delivery drivers that restaurants are scheduled, so it’s a safe bet that staffing up on delivery people is a smart business move.

Front of house restaurant staff with to-go orders

How has staffing fundamentally changed due to COVID-19?

During and post-pandemic, employee health is something that we have to take a lot more seriously. You look at businesses like Chipotle, which had to close some of their locations because of COVID-19 outbreaks among staff. They didn’t have enough healthy employees to operate. That’s a problem that independent restaurants simply can’t have. After COVID-19 hit, we adapted and added an Employee Health Check feature to our platform. When an employee clocks in with our 7punches app, they get a prompt with a few health and COVID-19 screeners. If they fail, they'll be blocked from punching in and managers get real-time updates to take appropriate action. We want restaurants to open back up, but it’s essential that we give them the tools to do that safely for their staff and their guests.

Restaurant staff are subject to temperature check prior to a scheduled shift

Another trend we're seeing is staffing layouts different from the traditional front of house/back of house split. We’re looking at less front of house positions and more back of house positions. This is likely due to increased delivery orders and prep needs. We’ve also seen a larger amount of staff classified as other or neither. This accounts for increased delivery staff and other employees taking on tasks like checking guests’ temperatures or extra sanitizing and cleaning efforts. This new model of staffing is reflected in the changes to restaurants we’ve seen this year.

Are there any early insights into how restaurants will need to staff in a post-pandemic world?

The pandemic has allowed a lot of companies to reassess what their ideal worker looks like. Restaurants will have to be able to identify those traits and figure out how to better screen when hiring. It’s likely that we’ll see a reduction in staff sizes at least for a while, so it’s important that you hire reliable team members that fit within your culture. We’re in an industry where it costs an average of $3,500 to hire a new hourly employee, so it pays to get it right the first time. If that much money in product walked out the door, you’d run after it. Hiring, training, and retaining the right people is something to take seriously, now more than ever.

About 7shifts

Founded in Saskatoon, Canada, in 2014, with offices in Toronto and New Jersey, 7shifts is simplifying labor management, one shift at a time. The restaurant employee scheduling solution is used by over 350,000 restaurant pros across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia, including multi-unit restaurant groups like Bareburger, Honeygrow, Smoke's Poutinerie, Yogurtland, Juice It Up!, and many others. More than a scheduling platform, 7shifts empowers restaurant managers to optimize their workforce to better manage employees, resulting in reduced labor costs. To learn more, or to sign up for free, visit www.7shifts.com, or find them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, the App Store, or Google Play.

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