With change in business matrix after the pandemic COVID, most of organisation felt the impact of payroll. This new emerging challenge has created a need to manage payroll by working hours, to transform a higher productivity level.
If we transform each man-hour into leaf of a tree then the entire work schedule looks like a fully grown branch but scattered and almost everywhere. Looks good in the landscape but not in a 'structured' environment of work.
Let's take an example of daily hotel occupancy, if we show each days occupancy in form of a graph, you will notice clearly it will show few spike in graph line. These spikes represents busy days/high occupancy days for that period. They need to be managed in a way that hotel does not incur any additional manpower cost. A clear challenge is to manage high occupancy days with available resources.
The important point in any busy/high occupancy day is that few hours are busy where excess man-power is needed. Whereas, other hours is not as busy. This allow to schedule the day based on hours. Therefore it is utmost important that a busy day need to be broken-down into hours, when extra manpower is needed and the time of the day that is relatively not busy.
The work schedule of employees can go around this hourly timing chart where extra man-hours are allocated during busy hours instead of only using break-shifts where the work hours are fixed. An employee can be called for 5 hours in one a days and another day for 10 hours based on requirement instead of fixed 9 hours shift which will need extra heads to cover the busy time.
Hourly concept is similar to 'break-shift' in hotel but applied differently.
Let's take an example of weekly standard working hours for staff that is 45 hours for 5 days which equate to 9 hours work each day. Traditionally the break-shift is 4 hours morning shift and 5 hours Evening shift based on how busy the restaurant is. Now, for the concept that we are taking, the Manager will only consider that 45 hours which is available to him as working hour for each staff, where his business pattern is changing. He would need staff for extra/more hours on busy weekend i.e., Friday, Saturday and Sunday. To manage with limited numbers of staff, he would need to allocate more hours for busy days i.e., 5 hours morning and 6 hours in evening. That means in 3 days, one of staff will work for 33 hours and his balance left will be at most 12 hours. Based on this working, the volume and time can be allocated to less number staff for different shift/days.
With this model the working hours changes with business volume.
A hotel work schedule, we can divided into two parts:
a) BOH for supporting departments such as Admin, HR, Sales and Finance
b) FOH for operating outlets such as Front Office, F&B, Spa and Engineering
The reason for this division is the nature of work and importance to be in the work place.
BOH work can be off-site, meaning that the need for staff to be present in office during working hours is not essential and the leverage in time can be given to them with the target of completion of work in time. By doing so we can be sure that no-one can claim extra working hours or complain about stretched hours.
This part is also assisted by fast pace moving technology where the various reports and multi-property or unit data can be consolidated and viewed/analysed in different formats. Reduction in time and effective filtered data will drastically reduce work hours giving more flexibility in work.
FOH on the other hand cannot be operate off-site. Therefore we must plan the manning based on work hours and avoid preparing work-roster based on days. Higher occupancy or busy days need more work force and if we divide the busy day into three or four period, it will further give us an indication of peak hours. Most of restaurants & kitchen operates on 'break-shift' concept where breakfast and dinner time is busy thus dividing the staff daily shift into two parts by attending two different shifts.
All we need is to spend more time understanding business requirement for coming weeks/and months and thus allocating the man-hours available in a similar trend.
We need to count 'Man-hours' instead of 'Head-count' to successfully managing the outlets or hotel with a minimum or base number of staff. I have mentioned the same in my another blog for 'FTE Productivity' The man-hours should be in combination of FT, PT and CS working hours giving the Manager more flexibility in managing work schedule.
Good Luck to you all, use another concept of 'Managing payroll by hours'......
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