How will the market react when we are allowed back out of our cubicle? How will your customers react? Should you expect to be caught off guard or will normal life drag on? Nobody knows. But soon you will have to start drawing up your schedules.
AAPI tells you some tricks to plan as efficiently and flexibly as possible. AAPI's planning and payroll module ensures that you receive the tips & trics below as a smart sensor and notification in your planning at the moment it matters for your optimal efficiency estimate and calculation. AAPI's intelligent sensors playfully tell you everything about the social legal implications of your actions in the field.
There is no such thing as complete flexibility, you know that too. Your employees are not hanging on by a thread. As a rule, you will have to announce your variable hourly schedules at least five days in advance. However, with overtime, flexi-jobs, students and interims, you can quickly pump in some hours. Changing your schedule during the week and cutting hours at the last minute is not possible, unless your employees agree. A good discussion with your employees beforehand seems to us to be the only right start. It will be give and take in the next few weeks anyway.
Great flexibility
Unlike in most sectors, there is quite a bit of stretch on hourly schedules in the hospitality industry, thanks to the ‘great flexibility’ system. This allows your people to perform their contract hours not strictly on a weekly basis, but on average over a longer period, usually a year. If the first few weeks of the restart are on the calm side, you may only allow your full-time employee to work 30 hours, for example. You let the other 8 hours catch up as soon as you get back to full speed. This avoids being stuck with too many fixed hours that you may not be able to fill all of them. You do need to make sure that each employee has neatly performed their average contract hours at the end of the year. To take advantage of the great flexibility, it is especially important that your labour regulations provide for the principle as well as the hours.
Net overtime
You all know about net overtime. In the next few months, they will become even more important. On net overtime, you pay no patronage charges and the employee no taxes or NSSO. Although flexi-jobs or students are sometimes slightly cheaper, the advantage of these hours is that they are performed by your most experienced employees. Moreover, it is also nice for them that this allows them to quickly make up some of their lost income from during the force majeure. And did you know that you can also apply these hours for flexi-jobbers and students, provided they are full-time, of course.
Part-timers
Part-time employees are unfortunately the least interesting of all from a cost perspective. You don't get a box office discount for them, you can't let them perform net overtime and their flexibility is also limited. Thus, you can let them perform 12 ‘credit hours’ each month on top of their hourly schedule. However, you should note that if this happens regularly, the part-timer may demand a contract increase. This is when the contract supplement might be a better alternative. With this, you temporarily increase contract hours for a week or a month. And if your part-timer has a 38-hour attachment for a particular week, you can even apply net overtime for that week!
