4 strategies for reducing unplanned overtime

During a “normal” year, overtime is inevitable for most QSRs. When you factor in a pandemic, which is causing even more unexpected absences and an overall lack of staffing in restaurants than ever before, the discussion about how to best handle overtime is front and center. 

While paying overtime due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is unavoidable for most QSRs, it’s important for you to identify and prevent unnecessary overtime costs. We know how hard it is to keep a restaurant open during a tight labor shortage—and sometimes paying overtime is the way you’re keeping doors open. But what if you could minimize this extra spend that’s diminishing your profitability?

Let’s take a closer look at how overtime is negatively impacting your QSR and four strategies you can use to reduce unplanned overtime.

Unplanned overtime hurts

There are many different reasons that QSRs pay more overtime than they need to. Common reasons include being short-staffed, mismanaging time-off schedules and even some restaurant cultures that encourage overtime in misguided ways. Regardless of the reason, unnecessary overtime has a negative impact on the financial health of QSRs. 

For example, once an employee reaches 14 hours of overtime in a week, it becomes less expensive to hire a new employee, even if the new employee is part-time. It’s also important to keep in mind that overtime includes both fixed and variable costs, which is easy to overlook.

Thankfully, there are several strategies you can adopt to cut down on overtime.

4 strategies for reducing unplanned overtime

Use scheduling software

VPs of operations in QSRs are increasingly leveraging scheduling software to align employee schedules with their restaurants’ needs. Scheduling software allows managers to create a best-fit schedule for their teams. 

Scheduling software allows you to match employee availability, roles and preferences with the specific demands of each of your restaurants. By leveraging powerful scheduling software, you can reduce unplanned overtime and optimize the use of regular hours first. If an open shift needs to be filled, your software can suggest an employee with the least projected overtime for the pay week.

Automate the scheduling process

Some QSRs continue to use outdated methods of creating, updating and communicating schedules to the team. Luckily, there are many tools on the market today that can do this for you.

By automating the scheduling process, you can reduce the time you need to create, update and communicate schedules to your employees. And, by making the scheduling process more efficient, you also enable employees to respond to changes in scheduling quickly—so you can avoid unplanned overtime.

Proactively manage employees

The ugly truth is that sometimes we underestimate the workload GMs and DMs have on their plates. Their day-to-days are filled with serving customers, coaching teams, hiring new employees, and ordering supplies. You get it. It’s a lot. 

That’s why it’s important to proactively manage your DMs and GMs workloads. Doing so will also help them avoid burnout and poor performance caused by being overwhelmed. Part of this proactive management is also making sure your managers aren’t facing excessive overtime. Not only can it impact your bottom line, but it can also affect the work-life balance of your best people.

Leverage real-time reports and alerts

Let’s talk real-time data. If you and your managers had real-time data available through mobile dashboards and alerts to inform you of when there’s a scheduling conflict, imagine how quickly you could address it. Explore tools that can surface this visibility to you and other leaders in your organization—and give restaurants a better chance of filling schedule gaps with available employees without having to pay overtime.

At Workstream, we help QSRs optimize their hiring processes so they can keep their stores fully staffed. Our automation and text-based platform engages applicants as soon as they apply, screens applicants and automates the interview scheduling.

If you’re a QSR leader looking for ways to take your hiring process to the next level, book a free demo with one of our hiring specialists today.