How to calculate the right number of kitchen staff and increase productivity.
This question worries many chefs. In the new realities of today’s economy, working with economic indicators has become a practical jewel in the crown. To stay afloat, you need to carefully calculate the optimality of your payroll costs. But how do you get to the optimal payroll to improve employee productivity?
First, you need to determine what your team’s workload is based on demand. And to do that, you’ll need:
The number of meals.
How many meals were sold for each hour of operation? This data can be downloaded from any accounting program for the period you are interested in. Write-offs and losses do not need to be taken into account, it will not greatly affect the final result, the error will be minimal.
Number of cooks
How many staff actually were on shift in a particular hour for a selected period? Be sure to take the data from the timesheet, not from the planned schedule.
Next, divide the number of meals by the number of cooks and get the number of meals produced by 1 cook in a particular hour.
Now you need to understand: is this number a lot or a little? How many meals can one cook prepare in one hour? To answer these questions, calculate the average cooking time in each shop and fix the rate of output per hour.
Compare the resulting rate with the calculated fact and identify unproductive hours.
Step by step, your algorithm for action should be as follows:
Set performance standards;
Conduct a load analysis;
Make adjustments.
It is very important that this procedure be cyclical, because external and internal factors are constantly changing.
Effective staffing schedules, everyone!
