What is HR or Human resources and what exactly does it mean? For restaurant management, HR can mean a lot of things.
In actuality, restaurant management is more than just payroll and scheduling. Restaurant owners also need to be aware of employee performance, annual leaves, and workplace happiness; which can all contribute to HR.
But the most complicated aspect of HR management, is employee compliance.
Evidently, fines regarding audits and employee management can be hefty and severely affect your workplace culture. But don’t worry, there’s a solution! The introduction of technology in the restaurant management has vastly improved employee management for restaurant owners.
HR software tools have become crucial in tracking metrics like employee retention and most importantly, compliance. With that being said, we’ve put together a list of why you should consider HR software for your restaurant:
Are you on top of vacation tracking? In Canada, vacation pay is mandatory. For some provinces, an employee who is employed by a company after x amount of years, is eligible for a vacation pay increase.
For example: in Ontario, after an employee has been employed by the same company for 5 years, they’re eligible for a vacation increase of 4 weeks to 6 weeks.
In the US, annual leaves are not required, but for employers who offer it, HR software can help keep employers keep track of what type of vacation they offer; whether it's unpaid days off, accrued vacation days, etc.
HR management software is also a useful tool in storing important documents, specifically relating to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). ACA compliance is an extremely sensitive task. Restaurant employers that do not provide ACA-compliant health coverage are susceptible to outrageous fines. However, restaurant HR software can be used as a tool to track, organize, and store all these documents to track accurate compliance!
HR software should also have the ability for new hires to fill in their onboarding documents remotely! Skip the game of phone tag; collect applications or hiring packages with HR onboarding software! Employees can fill out their own information and all their documents will be stored in a single, secure space.
As one of the most rampant problems of the industry, tracking and addressing employee management issues like employee turnover is a key aspect of restaurant HR. HR software should allow you to track employee performances and factors like turnover rates or yearly anniversaries.
These metrics are crucial in the growth of your business and the quality of your team. If you’re having a spike in your employee turnover rate, evaluate the factors like your training processes, or observe any behaviors that may be contributing.
Generally, if you have low retention rates, you should be re-evaluating your management, or training processes. Alternatively, you should also be looking at how you're managing a high retention rate; or confirm if your employee data is being accurately recorded. More often than not, if you see inconsistencies with retention rates, it's likely that your data is being inaccurately tracked.
One of the biggest perks of restaurant HR software, is the ability to store all employee documents in one place. Cloud based software allows you and your managers to access different documents across one platform. This is a huge benefit for multi-location brands!
Cloud based HR software has the ability to act as an online filing cabinet. You can store all your employee performance documents, write-ups, etc in one place - that's accessible from anywhere! Yearly performance reviews are made 10x easier when you’re not digging for old documents and employee performance tracking is made easy throughout the year.
As a business owner, your role is to make your managerial tasks easy for you and your employees. HR software can help with this! Generally, printed restaurant training guides are easily lost or misplaced as soon as they're handed out. As a result, restaurant policies can be easily forgotten. But by having important documents like employee handbooks easily accessible, the excuse of not having the restaurant rules is eliminated.
“In the labor numbers, we were reporting about a $300 to $400 difference than what we were getting through Push!”
-Tara Hardie, ZZA Hospitality Group, 16 locations
