Tips for Making Data-Driven Staffing Decisions

Investigating key trends with analytic tools can help your business save money

In many businesses, there is a delicate balance to be struck when it comes to staffing. Obviously you want to be sure you have enough staff to create a superior customer experience at all times, but not so many team members on duty that your labor costs are inflated unnecessarily. You also want to keep employee satisfaction high and turnover low to promote top-quality performance and avoid the costs associated with frequent hiring.

Rather than relying on guesswork or gut feelings to adjust your staffing and manage your labor costs, you can and should tap into the power of analytics. With a few simple, web-based tools, you can easily collect data related to staffing, identify trends, and make intelligent, data-driven decisions.

Here are a few tips that will help you make data-driven decisions to improve your business and your bottom line:

Identify Peak Service Periods

Matching your staffing to your service needs is absolutely essential. Analytics can be used to identify peak service periods as well as slow times, so you can adjust your staffing accordingly.

Look for Overtime Trends

A little bit of overtime can have a big impact on your overall labor costs, especially if overtime is consistently required week after week or month after month. By tracking the right data points, you may be able to discover the underlying factors that are contributing to overtime needs and develop a cost-effective plan for addressing the situation.

Track and Analyze Employee Performance

Matching your staffing to service demand is an important first step in ensuring customer satisfaction. But you also want to make sure you have your best employees on duty at critical times. This can be accomplished by tracking data points related to employee performance, such as transactions per hour, customer complaints, etc. Tracking performance in this way will also help you to make fair, data-driven decisions when employees need to be promoted, given bonuses and raises, demoted, or fired.

Investigate Turnover

Employee turnover can be very costly to your business. First of all, you have to deal with the costs of hiring and training replacements. Plus, your customer service may suffer if sudden employee departures leave you understaffed or staffed with new teams that are struggling to work together effectively. By developing exit surveys for departing employees, you can investigate the reasons behind turnover. For example, you may discover an issue with low job satisfaction or overly heavy workloads. By addressing these issues, you can reduce future turnover rates.

Compare Locations

If you operate a franchise or have multiple business locations, comparing the performance of each location can be a very fruitful endeavor. You may discover trends at the high-performing locations that can be modeled across the other locations to improve their performance.

Time to Try MyFieldAudits

MyFieldAudits is a simple, web-based analytics tool ideal for performance tracking at retail, restaurant, hospitality, and franchise businesses. It can be customized to include the metrics you need to evaluate your staffing situation and much more. To learn more about using MyFieldAudits to make data-driven decisions about your business operations, please contact us at info@MyFieldAudits.com. We will be happy to set up a free demo.