5 Staff Behaviors Your Restaurant POS Can Uncover

Ask any restaurant owner; staffing is a huge cause of aches, pains, and grey hair. Finding, evaluating, not to mention securing, talent is such a gruelling process. It’s no surprise that 30% of restaurant owners cite staffing as the biggest pain points for their businesses.

While it would be amazing if you had the time to keep constant tabs on your staff, evaluating their performance at each table, unfortunately, you have a million other things that require your attention. The good news? Your restaurant POS can do this monitoring for you. Here are five crucial things you can learn about your staff with the help of your POS.

What Your Restaurant Pos Can Tell You

1. Who are the Superstar Salespeople
Your POS could display upsell modifiers all day long, but who on your team is actually taking the time to offer these additions? To find out, lean on your restaurant POS to reveal which employees pull out all of the stops in order to increase the spend of every guest visit.  By diving into your Modifier Report, you’ll see a breakdown of which menu item modifiers are being used and how often. If modifiers come with an extra charge, the report will display how much money was earned from the modifier, ultimately proving who your teams upselling champs are, so you can reward accordingly.

You can also decipher your top performers from the number of tips they’re bringing in. If they’re offering superior service, chances are their tips will be higher than your other employees who are just offering the bare minimum. Easily access these insights from the Credit Card Tips Report in your POS.

2. Who’s About to Break
The restaurant staffing game is a fickle one; overstaff and waste money or understaff and experience staff burnout – neither option is desirable. Luckily you can use your POS’s reports to help with both scenarios.

Start off with sifting through the basics in your Hours Summary Report; a summary of hours worked, shifts completed, total pay – but then look further. To really rake the value out of your hours report, you’ll need to run this report on daily, monthly and yearly intervals to truly understand how labor expenses vary from one timeframe to the next.

These labor reports are especially valuable, from an HR perspective, when it comes to addressing fatigue or scheduling complaints, as they allow you to uncover underlying trends that would have otherwise gone unseen. If you do come across an employee who’s frequently working into overtime and appears to be noticeably overworked, your POS’s Hours-Worked Alerts can help you avoid a potential HR nightmare. These alerts notify management when an employee is nearing overtime, allowing them to step in and correctly staff the shift.

3. Who’s Continuously Committed
Want to know which employee is constantly going above and beyond the call of duty? Surprise – your POS can tell you that too. Say you introduce a new menu item and ask your staff to push it hard for the first few days. After which – using the reporting side of your restaurant POS – you can track the total amount sold by a given employee with a customized sales report, or track who sold the most of a specific item by looking at a menu item report.

Another way you can keep a pulse on your value-added staff is by comparing your projected labor costs in your staff schedule against your actual labor reports. This way, you can see if John picked up more shifts than he was originally scheduled for, or if he stepped up to work overtime when Kat was out sick.

4. Who’s Taking Advantage
No restaurant owner wants to believe one of their employees could be taking advantage of loopholes in the systems and processes in place at their business. But, if you have reason to believe an employee is pulling a fast one on you, a restaurant POS that offers control and insight into your staff’s actions is the most important tool you can have for restaurant loss prevention. Say one of your bartenders opens a table, punches in three rounds of drinks, and prints the bill without sending the drinks to the bar. They then delete a round of drinks before closing the bill and pocketing the cash. Rely on your POS reports for confirmation; if a staff member has been voiding a questionable amount of items, your reports will give you the proof you need. For more preventative measures, look to the staff settings and controls in your POS. With manager permission requirements, you can ensure only specific staff members have the ability to void or print checks with unsent items.

Inventory and staff reports are another way to uncover potential theft in your restaurant. For example, if you notice that on the past three Friday night shifts a few bottles of beer have gone missing from your physical inventory, you can reference that loss with your shift report. If you see those were Alicia’s nights on bar, you have the facts you need to inquire about the disappearing bottles instead of going off of a hunch.

5. Who’s Slacking Off
It’s a concern that plagues management in many industries; are your employees actually working while they’re on the clock? Thankfully in the restaurant industry, with smart POS technology, these slackers are easy to spot – here are two easy ways.

First, dig into your Detailed Shift Report. From here, you can see your staff’s clock in and clock out times, their shift length, and their cash tips. So if both Alex and Ken worked nine hour shifts, with Alex making hundreds in tips while Ken made none, it’s easy to determine which employee is underperforming.

Second, turn to your Hours-Worked Alerts to identify which of your employees aren’t meeting their quota of hours. With this data, you’ll be able to have a much more candid conversation with an underperforming employee, since you have the insights from your POS to back up your claims. You can match this report up with data from your restaurant scheduling app of choice to further confirm scheduled hours versus actual hours.

Your staff are the single most important point of impact to your profitability, so leverage your restaurant POS in order to uncover the rockstars on your team, and the under-performers who are putting a dent in your bottom line.

Jackie Prange

Read more posts by this author.