Giving workers schedules in advance is good for business

When Adam Orman was a bartender, he found out on Sunday if he was going to work on Monday.

“Yeah, that’s the worst,” Orman said. “I didn’t have children, but I wanted to have a life.”

Orman is now the boss as co-owner of two restaurants in Austin, Texas. He does have children and said the goal is to schedule staff a month in advance.

“The predictable schedule is one of the things that I think is probably appreciated the most by the team, and it doesn’t cost us a dime,” Orman said.

If you’ve worked hourly shifts, you probably know what it’s like to not know when you’re working. The service sector has a reputation for giving workers their schedules without much advance notice, sometimes as little as a day. But there are glimmers of change in some places where businesses are embracing a “predictable schedule.” This is either because employers are required by law to issue schedules early – or they realize it’s good for business.

At one of Orman’s restaurants, an Italian joint called L’Oca d’Oro, manager Mallory Valentine was answering the phones and getting ready for a quick dinner.

She said knowing when she works helps her plan her child custody schedule. It also helps her mentally prepare for work.

“To be able to be there for my colleagues. So that I can’t bring chaotic energy into the workplace with me,” Valentine said.

But it can be difficult to keep up with this kind of planning. It’s been busy here—L’Oca d’Oro has just opened a sister restaurant—and the posting of the kitchen staff’s schedule slipped to release just two weeks in advance.

Still, this is better than the average for the service sector.

“It’s really the norm to give shorter notice,” said Kristen Harknett, a sociology professor at UC San Francisco and co-director of the Shift Project.

Her survey of hourly workers at major U.S. retail and food service employers, including fast-food chains and restaurants, found that two-thirds of them receive less than two weeks’ notice.

In addition, the majority said that their schedules often changed at the last minute. “Your shift may be canceled or you may be asked to stay late. So things change a lot,” Harknett said.

She pointed out that one state — Oregon — and a handful of cities now have laws requiring some employers to hand out schedules at least two weeks in advance.

Harknett studied the effects of this in Seattle and found that workers there reported improvements in sleep, economic security, and overall levels of happiness. It’s also good for their employers.

“We saw evidence in our research that when workers provide more stable schedules, employees are more loyal, less likely to say they’re looking for a new job,” Harknett said. “And turnover is very expensive for business.”

So if it’s good for business, why do so many service sector employers keep their workers on edge?

“It’s a bad habit,” Harknett said. “It’s a business culture where there’s this single-minded focus on minimizing labor costs without regard for the other costs of that approach.”

One possible solution, Harknett noted, is technology.

John Waldman, who runs the Homebase payroll and scheduling app, found that one challenge is that some restaurants create the schedule from scratch every time. So his company provided different templates, even for weeks that were different.

“The templates helped a lot,” Waldman said. “Instead of feeling like, ‘Oh, I’m building a new schedule every week,’ it’s like, ‘Well, we really have three variations of the schedule.’

So restaurants can appear on the “Valentine’s Day is Tuesday” schedule. Or the “It’s Memorial Day and everyone will be out of town” schedule.

At L’Oca d’Oro in Austin, owner Adam Orman said it’s also a matter of prioritizing these kinds of administrative tasks.

“It’s easy to let it fall through the cracks,” he said. “Housekeeping, inventory is a really important part of the job, but it doesn’t seem as important as cooking.”

But Orman has seen the payoff in doing this documentation. His staff turnover is about 40%, he said. This is much better than the rest of the hospitality industry, where it was around 76% last year.

Orman wants his workers to stick around. “We wanted to make sure it was something adults could do,” he said. “That people can be in the restaurant for a long time. So that our clients recognize their servers and our servers recognize them. We want this to be a place for regulars.”

Orman said if the restaurant industry wants to be taken seriously, then it needs to provide things for employees that other industries provide.

In essence, it also needs to grow. This means not leaving tasks like planning to the last minute.