Many managers still draw up their schedules based on a general hours budget and gut feeling. The result? At the end of the week, you are faced with unexpected, higher costs, such as unnecessary overtime or too many or too few staff on the floor.
Want to make structural savings on personnel costs without compromising on service? Then you need to base your budget on facts and specific tasks, even before you create the schedule. Here's how smart workforce management (WFM) helps you work more efficiently from day one.
The first step is to establish the financial framework. You start with the establishment forecast, which allows you to link labor costs directly to the expected turnover.
The advantage: you avoid scheduling hours arbitrarily. You establish the relationship between the costs and the expected revenues of your location in advance.
Where most WFM systems stop at a general budget for the "Bakery" or the "Cash Register," we go one step further. Strategic WFM allows you to refine your labor cost budgets at the most specific level: the task.
This is where a Workload Planner (WLP) comes in handy. Such a planner translates the total hours into a detailed breakdown, allowing you to know exactly how many budget hours you need per department and per task, and when.
Concrete example: Suppose you have a 5-hour budget for cleaning the orange juicer. If your store has a rule that this can only be done on weekdays, set the budget hours for Saturday and Sunday to 0%. The hours will be redistributed across Monday to Friday. This ensures that the right work is scheduled at the right time.
This precise planning for each task has a direct impact on your labor costs and working methods:
Accurate planning: Because your budget hours are allocated so specifically per task, you know exactly when you need to schedule more or fewer people. This reduces the risk of over- or understaffing.
Less waste: You only schedule the hours needed to meet expected demand and complete tasks. You use fewer "just in case" hours, which often cause unnecessary costs.
Higher productivity: By linking hours to specific tasks and deploying them at the right time, employees work in a more focused and productive manner.
By using this strategic approach in the budgeting phase, you lay a solid foundation for lower personnel costs and better staffing levels. Without compromising your service. At the same time, this remains a forecast: you are working with expectations, and reality can always differ.
Planning is the foundation. Then you look at who to deploy. You can't just deploy the cheapest employees. You also need people with experience. And a good mix of permanent staff and flex workers is important. If you use too few flex workers, you'll lose them. If you deploy too few of your own people, you'll miss out on knowledge and quality.
Every store is different. It's a good idea to actively test this to see which mix works best for your store. In the next blog, I'll show you how to make adjustments during the week if circumstances change and the budget is no longer accurate.
Want to stop gambling and start with certainty?
Discover in a personal, no-obligation demo how our WFM solution structurally reduces your labor costs at the task level and optimizes your occupancy rate.
