Right place and the right time: the future of workforce management in hospitality

We know that general managers usually start their weeks with the most crucial task: team scheduling. This balancing act of team requests, demand predictions, and budget constraints is time-consuming – and still often needs changing at the last minute.

Rising labour costs and evolving employment legislation are adding additional elements to an already challenging task. Meanwhile, the industry continues to struggle with recruitment and retention. Accurate, advanced, and responsible workforce management can lead to a better employee experience and, with it, guest experience.

Out with the old

Scheduling often relies on historic sales patterns, managers’ intuition, manual spreadsheets or even a physical filled-out sheet of paper. But the hospitality industry has never been static: team members need to swap shifts, someone may call in sick, or a sudden change in external factors means staffing needs to change to reflect demand.

This means managers are often spending the majority of their time building rotas from scratch regularly, dealing with shift swaps personally, and constantly adjusting schedules. Many are making complex workforce decisions using incomplete information through inefficient means – and these last-minute changes can have an adverse impact on team morale, productivity and wellbeing.

Looking ahead

Demand is becoming increasingly difficult to predict, and relying on old systems or past experience is no longer enough to be fully accurate. The issue is not having too few employees, but how to best place them to provide a great customer experience.

Something such as weather or school holidays are a given and have a similar effect year-on-year that you can prepare for. But what happens if there is a last-minute train strike? A sudden influx of likely disgruntled customers can turn a quiet day into a rush. Or a big event nearby? Depending on fans’ demographics, this could mean your stock is out of sync with customers’ tastes – a Taylor Swift fan is likely to have a different average order than football fanatics, and your venue needs to be prepared for either.

Managers always try to account for the variables, but the world has become more complex and customer expectations ever higher. Now, there are hundreds of potential nuanced factors that businesses have no reference point for. Modern forecasting tools can analyse these simultaneously, identify issues ahead of time, and discover patterns by combining these signals that would be impossible to spot manually – creating operational excellence that sets your business apart.

Team wellbeing

Better forecasting and scheduling not only improve guest experience but also boost employee well-being and productivity. Teams value predictability and accurate staffing to keep up with footfall. When schedules are better aligned to demand, this means fewer last-minute changes and unnecessary cuts to shifts, alongside more consistent hours.

Improved work-life balance means a working environment people want to stay in. Against a backdrop of staff shortages and retention issues across the industry, optimising employee wellbeing is vital for long-term success – not just labour costs.

Supporting, not replacing

Technology isn’t there to replace managers but to help them make easier, more informed, and efficient decisions. Between suggesting schedules and highlighting any risks, AI can streamline an otherwise time-consuming process that often needs changing at a moment’s notice. Tools can automate this process whilst processing hundreds of factors at the same time.

That being said, managers still retain ownership over scheduling. AI can provide recommendations, additional context, and identify staffing gaps or upcoming demand trends, but this is just the starting point. Humans still ultimately make the final decisions, where lived experience can provide that final golden piece of context.

Predicting the unpredictable

The most successful operators won’t be those who simply schedule labour more efficiently, but those who use better forecasting and workforce insight to create a healthy working environment. Managers can lead effectively, employee wellbeing is prioritised, and guests receive dedicated, consistent, great experiences. In an increasingly unpredictable market, AI tools can help hospitality operators forecast demand more accurately and make confident decisions.

In our next blog in this series, we will highlight how AI tools can work as your best manager, supporting them to have the time to focus on guest experience and the workplace environment.

Written by Paul Watson, VP of Hospitality at Sona. Find out more about how Sona can help with better workforce management here: www.sona.ai/