9 minute read
FEATURE: HR & Administration
People first
Hospitality is all about people — and the same notion applies when it comes to managing your workforce.
PROVIDING THE CUSTOMER with a seamless and memorable dining experience is constantly front of mind for operators and their teams. So much so, it can be difficult for hospitality professionals to carve out the time to complete tasks that ensure the very people who make a venue so great are taken care of.
Technology platforms have come a long way in recent years, and are constantly boosting efficiency when it comes to everything from rostering and payroll to team communication and forecasting.
Six industry figures speak to Hospitality about their go-to platforms for all things hospitality admin, the core challenges when it comes to managing people as well as their tech wish lists.
Alexandra Preece and Cherie Bunn
HR department, Gradi Group
What are the key challenges of hospitality admin?
Any challenges the business is facing as a whole will naturally follow through to administration. One of the key challenges is due to the physical, hands-on nature of hospitality. Our primary business is providing service to our guests/customers and this means employees must be present and attentive.
But this necessary emphasis can pushadministration tasks onto the backburner.Providing our service-orientated employees withthe time and focus to complete administrativetasks is a big challenge. After all, all areas of thebusiness must work together to provide a highstandard of service to our guests as well as toexternal and internal stakeholders.
What platforms do you currently use?
Microsoft Office suite; we are calmest when we are buried in a mountain of Excel documents that track our work life. As the name administration suggests, the work is data- and people-heavy, so we use software platforms to simplify where possible. Recruitment platforms such as Talent Propeller are used to centralise administration. We also use our time and attendance system Adi Insights to roster employees and measure employee time for payroll.
Can you list some tech platforms that have boosted efficiency?
Tools for tracking task completion are extremely useful such as Monday.com. It ensures important tasks and deadlines are not missed and more support can be allocated to tasks that are lagging.
Employee chats and meetings have been sorely missed. Whether it is a quick weekly WIP with your team or regular employee chats; they are essential for keeping your finger on the pulse of the required administration.
Forecasting is also something we are trying to utilise more, particularly for rostering. Prebookings assist forecasting, and forecasting is essential to managing staff levels and wage cost levels.
What features would you like to see rolled out across tech systems?
The key features that need improvement are flexibility and integration. While helpful, these platforms are not efficient when we need to doublecheck different software for items that have fallen through the gaps.
Further, no two hospitality organisations areexactly the same, and platforms need to be flexibleto cater to different needs. It is as simple as beingable to allocate a specific name to a task or addinga specific payment type to a location.
Roubler’s tips for selecting workforce management, rostering and payroll software
• Compliance: TheModern Award system is notoriously complex. Systems with built-in, automated award interpretation will help provide peace of mind with compliance.
• All-in-one: Don’t risk your data integrity with multiple systems. Look for a solution that incorporates all the features you need to provide clarity over your entire workforce.
• Efficiency: Creatingefficiencies is key fora thriving business.Workforce managementsoftware should allowyou to understandstaffing costs in realtime and enable agiledecision-making.
• Communication: When it comes to employee experience, effective communication is key. Providing easy access to rosters, payslips and more via a mobile app is a must.
• Innovation: Cloud technology is evolving at a lightning-fast pace. Choose a software provider who is staying ahead of the innovation curve to provide solutions that will scale with you into the future.
Find out more atroubler.com/au
Ben Cleary- Corradini
co-founder and owner, Gnocchi Brothers
What are the main obstacles that come with hospitality admin?
Time is money! There is not a lot of time left at the end of the day for owner–operators to do admin. We have found the more automated the process and less time-intensive, the better. We have gone from trying to do everything ourselves (where it would take forever to work out multiple casual staff pay rates under industry pay levels for weekday, weekend public holidays) tousing FoundU. It’s an automated HR system which translates casual payrates and is set up to pay correctly; it makes life so much easier.
What platforms do you currently use across the business and what features do you find most useful?
We use FoundU for HR and payroll and Xero for accounting. FoundU’srostering tool is great as it shows your labour costs per shift, per day and per week, allowing us to better plan our labour model.
How could admin processes be improved through tech innovation?
Integrated hospitality metrics or benchmarks would be a great addition. It would be very insightful for measurement and comparison across multiple sites if you could automatically extract key performance indicators from your POS and HR systems.
Across our locations, we measure indicators such as cost of labour/sales revenue and sqm of area/revenue on a weekly basis. A system that could provide this information automatically and accurately per site would be very well received in our industry.
Rachel Checinski
general manager — human resources, Australian Venue Co.
What are the key challenges when it comes to managing people?
Communicating with a workforce that is geographically spread out across Australia. Not all employees have a company email address, so when we needed to communicate directly with front-of-house staff, we had to rely on sending emails to personal email addresses, which not everyone checks frequently.
We’ve recently started working with LiveTilesReach, which is an app that enables direct two-waycommunication between management and staff andamong staff members. The newsfeed, which all staff canpost to, has been really popular with our team.
Which platforms do you find the most useful?
LiveTiles has had an amazing uptake by staff; people post photos from all over the country every day to share with the team and there’s been some great banter! It’s been good for sharing useful reminders with the team during busy periods.
Are there any features you’d like to see on tech platforms that are currently not available?
We’re working directly with Reach and their team on providing feedback for developments we’d like to see improve within the app. Most of the feedback is about functionality such as notifications and the speed of the software.
Leigh Robbins
venue manager, Sebastian
How would you describe the obstacles that come with hospitality admin?
The biggest challenge by far is finding the time to complete critical admin roles. I find myself squeezing important tasks into any spare minute I can find, however there is always the feeling that you never quite have enough time to get it all done. Juggling management admin while leading a large team and working on the floor is extremely difficult.
What platforms do you currently use at the venue?
Deputy for rostering; Excel for sales reporting; Xero and Excel for business KPI reporting; Cooking the Books for food cost control; Monday.com for job applicants. Any Do for tracking my own tasks and tasks that I need my leadership team to complete and WhatsApp for group communications.
Can you list some tools you have been relying on the most in recent months?
Any Do and WhatsApp are probably used the most as they are focused on tasks and comms — I use them dozens of times every day. Any Do is particularly useful as it allows me to track tasks assigned to different people, which is important as it means I don’t have to remember everything. When I meet with each person each week or fortnight, I just refer to Any Do. WhatsApp as well. Reporting and KPI tracking tools are used on a weekly basis.
Karli Ostle
group brand and marketing manager, ETO Collective
What are the main touchpoints when it comes to managing admin within the business?
The key challenges for us are getting the balance right between customer experience, stakeholder management and efficiency and effective data gathering for marketing. Finding the right mix of tools and technology that deliver on all of that — while being cost-efficient and creating processes that keep things streamlined and easy to manage for our venue teams — is an ongoing battle.
Can you list the platforms you currently use?
We use OneDrive for file sharing, Microsoft Teams for communicating remotely and many spreadsheets. It’s a lot!
At the moment, One Drive is our most useful tool in terms of cross-functional communication. We have a system of shared drives to ensure everyone has access to the latest menus and collateral suites, so there is no confusion. At a venue level, the teams have dedicated WhatsApp groups that help with rostering and group comms, which they find quick and useful.
What innovations would make administration more efficient?
As we operate in a complex environment, the main thing I would like to see is more integration across key platforms. A team rostering and messaging system that lives within [a guest experience and retention platform] and helps with labour planning based on forecasted covers would also be amazing. ■
