Our constantly expanding technological world is the defining feature of the modern era — from smartphones in our pockets to drones in the sky, new inventions are being created all the time, and they change life all around us. The restaurant industry has always been wildly competitive, and managers would be wise to use some of the new technology to their benefit.

One easy way to help your restaurant streamline operations is adopting employee scheduling software. It can do this in a few ways, so read on to learn more about how it works.

Better Schedules, Faster

Creating a schedule involves negotiating the personal lives of so many employees with the demands of work, and sorting out this many moving pieces is a weekly burden that wastes time and causes frustration. Like its name suggests, employee scheduling software produces schedules in up to 80% less time than it would otherwise take, and the schedules are even better too!

This software frees up your staff so they can spend their time at work where they’re most effective — usually in the kitchen or with customers. Employee scheduling software’s faster schedules lead to a direct savings in labor costs of between 1-3%, an important gain given that labor costs is usually the biggest expenditure in a restaurant’s budget.

Efficient Leave Management

Employee scheduling software helps your staff feel independent and organized, all while enabling the restaurant to better plan its staffing needs sooner in advance. Now, all a staff member needs to do to request a day off is send their manager the request through their mobile app.

There’s no longer any need for that staff member and their manager to wait until they’re both at the restaurant. In fact, the manager can respond to the request through the app too, and what used to take days can now happen in minutes. Efficiency like this is what improved business results is all about.

Effective Communications

While the most high-profile new communications technology allows people to talk face to face from anywhere around the world, employee scheduling software is only as impressive as it needs to be: it is specifically designed to deliver the functions that restaurant managers and their staff need to get the job done. It does this in a few ways.

If a manager needs to inform their staff of something, they can send a one-way message which nobody can respond to. This prevents needless responses that waste people’s time.

But if they need to have a dialogue with one employee, or a certain team or even the entire group, that’s easy to create. This can be used, for example, when needing to quickly find someone to sub in for a shift on short notice.

Sometimes people get distracted by shiny new technology that may be sophisticated or cool, but it’s important that the technology you incorporate into your restaurant be selected because it benefits your business.