5 little things taking the stress out of reopening

Last weekend we saw many hospitality businesses reopen their doors to customers for the first time since lockdown began. Adjusting to the new normal has been a challenge for many of us, but we’ve found a few ways to make the operational side of things a little easier and ensure a COVID compliant reopening. Here’s how we’ve been helping our clients adjust:

Mastering shift patterns to minimise contact

As we’re sure you already know, the government’s advice for those working shifts is:

 ‘As far as possible, where staff are split into teams or shift groups, fixing these teams or shift groups so that where contact is unavoidable, this happens between the same people.’

Sounds like a headache, doesn’t it? With Rotaready you can use staff groups to create pools of staff who are allowed to work together. This makes it easy for you to keep contact between people at a minimum and help stop the virus spreading. 

Getting your head around flexible furlough 

On top of ensuring a safe reopening many of you also have flexible furlough calculations to get your head around. We’ve recently developed new functionality to take care of this for you! By using a daily pay rate for salaried employees who are on flexible furlough, Rotaready ensures they only receive their full salary on the days they work. This means your wage percentage remains accurate, crucial for managing labour costs.

Enabling mobile clocking in

A number of our clients have recently enabled our mobile clock-in functionality; allowing employees to clock in from the Rotaready mobile app on their own devices. This uses GPS to ensure your employees are physically within your workplace before they can clock-in and out. Enabling mobile clocking helps prevent the virus spreading by removing the need for employees to congregate around a tablet or be touching a shared screen.

Scheduling for the unknown 

Nobody really knows how busy cafes, bars and restaurants are going to be over the coming months; having to operate at limited capacity and giving customers time to adjust to the new normal. Our demand forecasting feature helps you predict revenue and footfall on any given day by picking up on the weather, historical sales, past and future reservations, and more. In these volatile times, we’ve added in even more intelligence to help predict how the following weeks and months will play out. This will help you make sure you have the optimum number of staff working each shift. Enough to keep your customers happy but no more than you really need. 

Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst

A second peak of COVID-19 is something that none of us want but we all need to be prepared for this as a real possibility. Using Rotaready you can easily see who someone last worked with if they were to fall ill. This allows you to track back and ensure anyone they have come into contact with on their previous shifts stays at home.

If you’d like more information on how you can use Rotaready to help you adjust to the new normal and lighten your load when it comes to workforce management, then drop us an email at team@rotaready.com or get in touch via live chat – we’re more than happy to answer any questions you may have. 

Best of luck to all of you who have reopened or are planning to do so further down the line!