Does your restaurant have enough staff for the busy summer season?

As restaurant owners, you know the summer season brings increased traffic and an opportunity to increase your profits. But are you prepared to handle the influx of customers? We've all experienced how a busy night in the restaurant can quickly give way to chaos if there aren't enough staff on hand to serve your guests. It's time to ask yourself: do I have enough staff in place for the upcoming summer months?

Let us provide you with a guide on how to prepare your restaurant for the busy summer season:

1. Analyse and plan: Analyse the trends and data from your previous summers to understand when your restaurant is likely to experiences peak business. Use this insight to identify areas where you need additional support. It is also a good idea to keep an eye on your reservations, as they are a great indicator of how busy you’re going to be.

2. Tools for efficiency: Do you have the right tools in place to run a smooth and efficient operation? Having outdated or malfunctioning tools can worsen an already bad situation for your staff working under stress. Make sure you have the right solutions in place to enhance the guest experience and help your staff do an even better job, and check if your equipment is properly serviced and maintained before the summer season starts.

3. Overview: If you now have followed step one and two you should have a good overview of your current situation. Maybe you need to order maintenance on some of your equipment, order a digital self-service solution to serve some of your guests, and you have probably seen a gap in your staff schedule. Though we may not be able to help you with all these preparations we can certainly help you with your staff schedule.

4. Staff scheduling: In order to create a staff schedule that aligns with your busiest days and times you need to take into account the insight you gathered in step one and see when you need to add more staff but equally important - where. However, there are a few more things to consider. Are you expecting your restaurant to be packed every day this summer?  And will your guests be ordering food and drinks throughout the day or are food orders likely to only occur during lunch hours only?  Are you serving guests both on an outdoor terrace and indoors? Will you also have a digital self-service solution in place to handle orders more efficiently? Your answer to these questions should give you an indication on how many waiters, chefs, bartenders and barbacks you need working, and when. Do you have enough staff for this summer?

5. Recruiting staff: When you have a complete overview of which positions you need to fill you are ready to start recruiting new staff. Luckily we provide a platform that makes it easy to do just that. Our technology lets you better manage your workforce, keep recruitment costs low, and increase productivity. We are not a staffing agency but a job network for the hospitality industry in Scandinavia. Are you ready to tap into our network of 25,000 jobseekers? It only takes a few minutes to get started- start recruiting your new top talent right here.

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