You can have the most innovative dining program around, but you’ll never be truly successful without the right team in place. Staffing operations, whether large or small, continues to be one of the biggest challenges for university foodservice directors looking to optimize their operations. But, don't despair: there are creative and practical solutions available to help you navigate these challenging times.
Whether you're dealing with labor shortages or just trying to make sure you run an efficient and profitable operation, this post offers some insights on how – even with today’s challenges– you can make sure that staffing doesn’t hinder you from running a program you’re proud of.
Here are seven tips to help university dining programs manage staffing challenges while maintaining food service quality:
Hire for Experience: When recruiting new staff, prioritize experienced hires to fill key roles. Experienced staff onboard more quickly, are often excited to take on challenges, and can help maintain quality and train new employees.
Embrace Cross-Training Opportunities: Inviting current employees to cross-train current increases your scheduling flexibility by enabling them to work in multiple roles within the dining program. In addition, it shows your willingness to develop your team, which, in turn, creates loyalty and buy-in.
Incorporate Employee Management Software: Employee management software can streamline scheduling, assignments, time tracking and payroll, reducing administrative workload and increasing productivity.
When Possible, Automate!: Increasingly popular and scalable automated food prep and service, such as smart-vending machines and robot assistants, can help reduce the need for additional staff members, while ensuring speed and efficiency, and giving students fresh dining options at times (late night, anyone?) when it’s more difficult to staff.
When Possible Offer Remote or Hybrid Work Solutions: Consider remote of hybrid work solutions for non-essential roles, such as administrative work or data entry, to help reduce on-site staff requirements and open these roles up to a new pool of applicants. These are often untapped options for student workers as well, who may may happy to say yes to a role they can do from almost anywhere!
Implement Mobile Ordering: Mobile ordering can help reduce wait times and lines, allowing staff to focus on other important aspects of the dining program while improving the overall student experience. Just make sure when you’re looking at mobile ordering solutions, that you don’t forget to separate out the pick up spot to reduce queuing traffic!
Utilize Dining Performance Solutions: Solutions like Envision360, a dining performance solution offered by Envision Strategies, offer data-driven insights into your dining program and can help identify areas for improvement and optimization. This solution uncovers areas of opportunity, which can help increase efficiency and productivity, all while reducing operating costs.
Overcoming the labor market challenges can feel overwhelming, but by being creative and strategic, university dining programs can offer innovative solutions while maintaining a high-quality dining program for their community. The use of technology-based solutions can be particularly helpful in optimizing for maximum efficiency, reducing costs, and creating a memorable dining experience for students.
Envision360 is a subscription-based program that provides the custom tools and resources you need to measure and self-monitor your Dining Services program. If you want to learn how e360 can help optimize and improve your program, visit env360.net, email support@env360.net or call us at 720.458.6480.
To stay up to date with our blogs, be sure to subscribe below!