Time Evaluation in Hospitality and Leisure: The Key to Greater Efficiency and Lower Labor Costs.

Time evaluation plays a vital role in workforce management within the hospitality and leisure industries. With operations that rely heavily on staff availability, scheduling, and efficient use of time, accurately assessing and managing the hours worked by employees is vital.

In this article, we delve into the significance of time evaluation in these industries, including how it ensures compliance with labour regulations and enhances overall operational efficiency.

What is Time Evaluation in Workforce Management Systems?

In workforce management solutions, “time evaluation” and “time and attendance” are two distinct modules that serve different purposes but work together closely.

Time and attendance focuses on attendance tracking, capturing and recording the actual hours worked by employees. It typically involves features such as time clock integration, timesheet submission, and absence management. Its primary goal is to accurately track and record employee attendance data, including clock-in and clock-out times, breaks, leave, and other time-related information in order to calculate wages.

On the other hand, time evaluation involves processing and analyzing the recorded time data to perform various calculations and derive meaningful insights. Its primary purpose is to interpret the captured time data and generate actionable information for payroll processing, cost analysis, and labour reporting.

A time evaluation engine applies predefined rules and policies configured in the system to the recorded time data. It validates against predefined parameters, and calculates various metrics such as worked hours, overtime, paid time off, and shift differentials. It also checks for exceptions – deviations in an employee’s time and attendance data that fall outside predefined rules, such as unapproved absences, breaks that are too long or short, and so on.

The output of a time evaluation engine is typically a set of processed and calculated data, including attendance summaries, labour cost breakdowns, and exception reports.

While the time evaluation engine performs calculations and generates data for payroll processing, it does not usually handle the actual payroll calculations itself. Instead, the processed data is passed to the payroll module or integrated with a separate payroll management system, where the final payroll calculations, deductions, and tax calculations are performed based on organizational policies and legal requirements.

By accurately evaluating and managing time, businesses can optimize shift scheduling and compensation management, monitor employee performance, and make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and workforce planning.

Benefits of Time Evaluation in the Leisure and Hospitality Industries

In the leisure and hospitality industries, customer satisfaction is directly tied to employee performance in many cases, which means time evaluation can have a significant impact on business outcomes.

Below are some of the key benefits of time evaluation in these industries – on its own and when combined with other modules of WFM software.

Identifying Areas of Waste and Inefficiency

Time evaluation can help businesses identify areas where time is being wasted or where processes are inefficient by tracking productivity.

A concrete example is in the housekeeping department of a hotel, where the hotel would track the time housekeeping staff take when cleaning and preparing guest rooms.

The data may reveal that staff are unable to complete the required number of rooms within their allocated hours, which could indicate a bottleneck in the process (such as spending too much time moving from one room to the next or taking too many trips to the store room  – well-known inefficiencies in hospitality).

Another issue that could be revealed is that certain employees are completing the required workload within their shift while others are not. This may suggest the need for additional training or the need to standardize the way in which certain tasks are done, ensuring that each employee takes a consistent and efficient approach.

In other cases, it may mean investigating barriers to employee productivity – as only 20% of working hours are spent on high-priority tasks, and in the UK, employees spend more than two hours per day doing anything that is not considered to be work.

Managing Complex Employee Scheduling

Providing exceptional guest experiences heavily relies on having the right employees in the right place at the right time. However, these industries often face unique challenges related to fluctuating demand, multiple shift patterns and event-driven staffing needs.

Analyzing time and attendance data provides insights that can inform the scheduling based on these complex requirements, allowing managers to create and adjust schedules based on specific skill requirements, staff availability, and the booking of special events.

WFM software also enables businesses to analyze historical trends, which helps in accurate demand forecasting and workforce planning, ensuring that the right number of employees are scheduled to meet anticipated guest volumes, taking into account seasonal variations and other factors.

This also helps in addressing smaller-scale variations, such as determining the optimal staffing levels for different times of day or week. This helps prevent overstaffing during slow periods and understaffing during peak times, leading to more efficient use of resources and improved customer service.

Effective Training and Development

Time evaluation data is an important part of talent management, providing insights into employee productivity and other performance management areas. This data can then be used to identify training needs and implement targeted development programs.

By investing in employee growth, businesses can elevate service quality, resulting in a positive impact on guest satisfaction and loyalty. In addition, training and development is a crucial part of motivating Gen Z employees, so it’s more important than ever to be well-informed about their needs.

Enhanced Staff-Guest Ratio

Effectively managing labour hours and schedules helps to ensure that the staff-to-guest ratio is appropriate. This means having enough employees available to deliver personalized and attentive service to guests, resulting in a positive guest experience.

More Benefits

Below are some additional benefits that apply in many industries.

Lower Costs
Optimized resource allocation leads to labour cost savings (from 3% to 7% with our workforce planning software).

Compliance
Ensures compliance with various labour regulations such as break requirements, maximum working hours, and overtime rules, reducing the risk of legal penalties or labour disputes.

Automation
The software automatically takes into account factors such as overtime, public holidays, weekend, or other required conditions.

Compliance with Service Level Agreements
Meet SLAs by accurately tracking employee working hours and ensuring staff coverage during specific service hours or contractually obligated time frames. This ensures that service commitments are met, leading to satisfied guests and maintaining strong partnerships with clients.

Integrations
Workforce software can integrate with systems such as payroll and other SaaS HR management solution. This allows for seamless data flow, eliminating the need for manual data entry and reducing the risk of errors or discrepancies.

Payroll Efficiency
The integration with payroll software automates the calculation of wages, overtime, and other payroll-related tasks. This reduces the administrative work involved and minimizes payroll errors, ensuring that employees are paid accurately and on time.

Real-Time Monitoring
The real-time monitoring of time-related data enables managers to address issues promptly and adapt to unexpected changes with ease.

Employee Self-Service
Time evaluation software often provides self-service capabilities, enabling employees to view their schedules, request time off, and access their time-related information. This empowers employees and further reduces administrative overhead.

Increased Revenue
The implications on revenue relate to optimized workflows and staffing levels, and improved customer service as a result. In addition, factors such as timely pay and insights into professional development needs may help retain employees.

Time Evaluation with the Best Workforce Management Software
Using an enterprise workforce management system facilitates all the benefits listed above. The core of our WFM solutions is an advanced time evaluation engine, providing the following:

• 100% accurate and timely pay slips for all legislations, Collective Labour Agreements or local business rules.
• Full compliance and support for multinational organizations; ISAE3402 and GDPR approved.
• Multinational and multibranch setup within one database – all parts of your organization with different legislations or regulations are managed centrally.
• Within the sets of regulations, you can vary the parameters based on employee type, function, location, department or even per employee, if required.
• Automatically updates in line with changes to the setup of regulations, ensuring calculations are always accurate.
• The re-calculation analyser lets you retrace your steps, indicating why the results are what they are.

Conclusion

Using the right workforce management software that has a powerful time evaluation engine equips organizations to efficiently manage their workforce, improve productivity, control labour costs, ensure compliance, and enhance the overall guest/customer experience.

It simplifies and automates administrative tasks, saves time, and enables businesses to focus on delivering exceptional service while effectively managing their most valuable resource – their employees.

These benefits enable businesses to consistently deliver exceptional guest experiences, exceed customer expectations, maintain efficient payroll processes, and ultimately thrive in a highly competitive market.

Our renowned enterprise workforce management software ensures that employees with the right skills are in the right place at the right place, and at the right cost – contact us today to book a demo.