Shift Pooling: harness the flexibility of your workforce

Staffing shortages have been with us for several years now – and will continue until at least 2025. The inevitable outcome is understaffed shifts, burned out staff, missed sales, workers decamping to better resourced competitors and a drop in customer service. No wonder a whopping 91% of hospitality leaders admit they’re concerned about staffing shortages.

On the other hand, workers are reportedly not getting what they need from their employers. Over half want to see improvements to their work-life balance and, while four in five say flexible hours are important to them, only 47% actually have flexibility.

If operators are to ensure they maximise shift fulfilment, while continuing to maintain and engage their workforce amid ongoing staff shortages, then they need new strategies to increase efficiencies and strengthen employee experience.

Enter Shift Pooling

Shift Pooling allows managers with unassigned shifts to open them up and promote them to the broader workforce, not just those assigned to their location.

Designed to make optimising staff schedules quick and easy, Shift Pooling gives managers at one venue access to additional resources. They can set parameters to open shifts – such as specialist skills required or which brand staff should be familiar with – and promote those shifts internally to anyone that meets that requirement and isn’t scheduled to work during that time.

Shift Pooling is a core capability of Fourth’s Intelligent Scheduling solution. Customers can take advantage of pooling their internal staff available now, with external agency staff pooling coming in early 2024.

More flexibility for staff

Three in five staff say they want the option to pick up additional shifts, and Shift Pooling allows them to do just that – whether they want to volunteer for last minute hours tonight or a shift in two week’s time. Shift Pooling means staff simply log in, see what shifts are available and throw their hat into the ring to cover them.

For individuals, this not only provides the flexibility to do more hours as and when they want, but also where they want. There may be venues with shifts available closer to their home than their normal venue, for example. Or, students that work in one location during term time can still pick up shifts in the summer when they return to their hometown. Similarly, Shift Pooling means individuals looking for flexibility of location – perhaps the chance to visit and work from another town or city for a month or two – have the choice to do so; fitting work into their lifestyle, unfettering them from a single location and helping operators to retain staff that might otherwise move to competitors for more convenient locations.

More flexibility for operators

Flexible deployment increases the ability to fulfil every shift across a group, freeing up resources from one location to support venues that might be understaffed. This means restaurant owners and managers can optimise shift scheduling with less staff, and ensures that all locations are connected as part of a network, rather than running in isolation.

Shift Pooling also features agency integrations, so open shifts can be pushed to outsourcing partners automatically if core teams aren’t available to fill them. This reduces the administrative burden on managers, allowing agencies to automatically request all the information they need to fill a shift and streamlining the acquisition of agency staff.

Optimising scheduling with Shift Pooling

With persistent staffing shortages plaguing the hospitality industry, shift pooling has emerged as a strategic solution. It provides employees with much needed flexibility, helping operators to stand out in a competitive job market and retain employees. By increasing labour deployment efficiency and uniting every location within a group or chain, Shift Pooling offers further benefits to operators, ensuring resources are evenly distributed across the business and limiting burnout and understaffing in busy locations.