How hospitality businesses train their teams and manage employee schedules might not be the first thing you associate with reduced labour costs and increased ROI. Yet, when implemented thoughtfully, effective employee training and scheduling can significantly impact your bottom line. This is especially relevant now, as rising minimum wage requirements continue to increase labour costs across the hospitality sector.
In this article, we’ll explore how labour costs are directly influenced by scheduling and training practices and demonstrate how the right approach can benefit your entire operation. With Rotaready customers experiencing an average ROI of 620%, it’s worth considering how optimised scheduling and training could strengthen your financial stability.
The hospitality sector faces unique scheduling challenges that directly impact labour costs. From last-minute booking surges to seasonal fluctuations, managers often find themselves stuck between optimal staffing and cost control.
One of the most significant challenges is predicting and matching staffing levels to demand. Understaffing can lead to poor service quality and lost revenue, while overstaffing means paying for hours you don’t need. Without real-time visibility over costs, managers frequently discover scheduling inefficiencies only after they’ve impacted the bottom line.
Compliance adds another layer of complexity. Working Time Regulations, break requirements and holiday entitlements must all be carefully considered when creating rotas. Manual scheduling makes it difficult to track these requirements, potentially leading to costly compliance breaches.
Beyond operational concerns, poor rota management takes a toll on employee wellbeing. Inconsistent scheduling can leave some employees underutilised while others are stretched too thin—understaffed shifts lead to burnout, and burnout leads to high turnover. In fact, recent research shows that 50% of hospitality workers experience workplace stress daily. Moreover, productivity suffers when teams are either overstretched or underused.
These scheduling challenges have far-reaching consequences. Employee dissatisfaction often leads to higher turnover rates, creating a cycle of recruitment and training costs that could have been avoided. The financial impact extends beyond direct wage costs – businesses face increased expenses from overtime payments, recruitment drives and time spent managing last-minute schedule changes.
Now that we’ve covered how poor scheduling impacts cost, let’s go over some of the benefits of strategic scheduling and effective online training on labour costs in hospitality.
Modern rota software does more than just organise shifts—it provides real-time insights to help you optimise your labour spend. By integrating with your EPOS and reservation systems, Rotaready pulls sales and reservations which can be viewed alongside wage spend; giving you a complete view of costs across your operation. Having visibility of this data all in one please means you can:
These insights enable you to make data-driven decisions about right number of team members for every shift, helping you avoid unnecessary labour spend. This ensures you’re never overstaffed during quiet periods or scrambling for coverage when demand spikes. With the right software, you can strike the right balance.
If your rota software includes employee attendance monitoring, you can be confident you’re paying accurately for hours worked. Rotaready’s automated attendance sanitisation feature ensures clock-ins and outs align with company policy, ensuring clean data is always fed directly into payroll. This eliminates any payroll errors and ensures you’re never over or underpaying your teams. Plus, it saves hours of manual checking and adjusting attendance records, freeing up your managers to focus on running the business.
With the right training, your team will be able to deliver exceptional customer experience, which will ultimately encourage repeat customers. Well-trained teams can handle higher table turnover and customer volume efficiently over teams with less training and development. This directly impacts your labour cost percentage while maintaining service quality.
You can make assumptions about the key things your customers want, such as efficient and polite service, but to really stand out amongst your competitors, use customer feedback to identify more detailed nuances to help inform the training you deliver. For example, was the service they received too pushy, did they wait too long, or not long enough, and what did they think of your teams’ menu knowledge? With this insight, you can take customer service one step further and ensure repeat customers.
Employee turnover is a significant challenge in hospitality, with employees frequently leaving their positions within the first year due to poor training and scheduling. However, investing in your team’s development makes a measurable difference—The UK’s Largest Hospitality Salary Survey found that employees ranked flexible hours (83%) and training sessions (88%) in their top five workplace benefits for job satisfaction.
This is backed by the results our mutual customer with Access CPL Learning has seen since implementing the training solution:
“Implementing Access CPL Learning has been a game-changer for BNAE, helping us to deliver impactful results across training and compliance. The enhanced visibility across the estate has helped up shape a learning programme that keeps our teams engaged and has contributed to increased rates of staff retention” – Bandai Namco Amusement Europe (BNAE)
You can read more about how BNAE are benefitting from using Rotaready & Access CPL Learning together here.
Have complete visibility into your team’s availability with Rotaready’s intuitive employee scheduling platform. By seamlessly aligning your staff’s skills and schedules with operational needs, you’ll have the right team members exactly where and when you need them. The platform’s smart absence management takes the guesswork out of holiday requests by instantly showing you who else is off during requested dates, helping you make informed decisions that keep your operation running smoothly.
When managers spend hours on administrative tasks like scheduling and data entry, it directly impacts the time they could spend improving customer experience and developing their teams. Instead of wrestling with spreadsheets, managers can focus on training new team members, improving service quality, and building customer relationships.
Rotaready automates these time-consuming administrative tasks, freeing up your managers to focus on growing your business.
In a webinar by Access Hospitality, industry experts explored the impact of ‘trading down’—a common challenge in January when customer spending typically declines. Virtual CFO, Tim Cundy, illustrated just how significant this effect can be. He explained that a restaurant generating £25k in weekly revenue, with a 5% profit margin, would see an annual profit of £54k. However, if every table ordered just one fewer drink on average, profits could drop by £30k—cutting earnings by around 60%. Given the high fixed overheads in hospitality, even small dips in spending can have a major financial impact.
On the flip side, if businesses encouraged the same amount in upsells, they could experience a £60k swing in the other direction. Training your team to upsell effectively can make a tangible difference to your bottom line.
So, training your team to upsell where appropriate, can have a big impact on your profits. Consider introducing incentives, such as friendly competitions or rewards for employees who sell the most daily specials or menu pairings.
Of course, upselling must be handled carefully. Customers don’t want to feel pressured; they want guidance from knowledgeable and helpful employees. With the right training, your team can approach upselling as trusted advisors rather than pushy salespeople.
With the minimum wage increasing to £12.21 per hour from April 2025 for employees aged 21 and over, compliance with legislation is necessary. Non-compliance with these regulations can result in substantial fines and back-pay requirements, directly impacting your bottom line. Beyond wage laws, there are numerous other legislative requirements like Working Time Regulations and break requirements that need careful monitoring.
This makes ongoing compliance training essential, not just a one-off exercise. Solutions like Access CPL Learning help you maintain consistent training standards, enabling you to bring new employees up to speed ahead of their start date and ensure continuous compliance through regular refresher modules.
Meanwhile, scheduling solutions can automatically validate your rotas against current legislation, flagging any potential issues before they become problems. Rotaready’s built-in validation checks give you confidence that you’re meeting all legal requirements, from minimum wage calculations to working time directives.
Rising wages and complex scheduling challenges don’t have to eat into your profits. As we’ve explored, smart scheduling technology can help you control labour costs in hospitality, maintain service quality and keep your teams happy. With Rotaready customers seeing an average ROI of 620%, there’s never been a better time to transform how you manage your rotas.
If you have any questions about any of the points covered in this article, or would like to find out more about Rotaready or Access CPL Learning, then get in touch with us at comms@rotaready.com. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. If you want to learn more about Rotaready’s offerings, check out our brochure.
25 February 2025
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