Productivity QuickGuide

Your Employees Are Your Biggest Expense…and Biggest Management Challenge.

Your employees can make or break the profitability of a particular location. And while ensuring that your employees provide a positive customer experience is critical, it’s even more important to ensure that they work efficiently and productively to keep your labor costs down to maximize your profits. We typically think of productivity issues as falling into two different categories: productivity issues that lead to added labor costs, and productivity issues that lead to a poor customer experience and therefore reduced revenues.

Poor employee productivity is unfortunately commonplace in the quick serve restaurant and convenience store industries, and until recently, there have been no easy, inexpensive methods to measure and manage this issue.

Productivity Issues That Lead To Added Labor Costs

Productivity issues that lead to added labor costs can be isolated to individual workers, but can also become “standard practice.”  The latter can happen when a majority of workers in a particular store, or on a particular shift, work at low levels of productivity, and therefore set a low standard for other employees (particularly new employees), or cause otherwise high productivity workers to work at a lower level of productivity “because working hard just doesn’t make a difference.”

Low-productivity issues that lead to added labor costs include outright time theft and non-approved behavior. These include the following:

  • Clocking in other employees/being clocked in by other employees
  • Arriving to a shift late, or leaving a shift early
  • Taking unauthorized or lengthy breaks
  • Engaging in non-work related activities while on the clock (use of cell phone, spending time with friends at work, etc)
  • Shirking of required tasks and responsibilities (for instance, cleaning, food preparation and other critical tasks)
  • Counter-productive activities (for instance, preventing other workers from doing their job, ignoring assigned tasks that prevent others from being done)

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