Full transcript of Restaurant Scheduling, Fixed: How Shiftwerx Cuts the Chaos — episode 345 of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, with Jake, founder of Shiftwerx. Speaker labels preserved; lightly edited for readability.
What this episode covers. Jake built Shiftwerx out of real restaurant scheduling pain: the phone calls, the last-minute swaps, and the manager who cannot leave the building because nobody else can write a schedule. The conversation covers what actually keeps managers up at night, the surge problem created by cutting staff too fast, star ratings and shift preferences, and a contrarian argument at the centre of the product: for scheduling fairness, deterministic rules beat hallucination-prone AI models. Jake also covers messaging staff will actually read, and why scheduling becomes a hiring advantage.
- In this transcript:
- Why Jake Built Shiftwerx
- What Actually Keeps Managers Up at Night
- The Surge Problem With Cutting Staff
- What Happens When Someone Calls Out Sick
- Writing a Schedule Without Experience
- Star Ratings and Shift Preferences
- Why Deterministic Rules Beat AI for Scheduling
- Why Scheduling Exists in the First Place
- Messaging Staff Actually Read
- Trying Shiftwerx
- Scheduling as a Competitive Edge
Jeremy Julian (0:00): Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us. As I like to say each and every time, I know you guys have got lots of choices. So thank you guys for hanging out today. Today is one of my favorite types of episodes because I’ve got a founder on the call here and I always like to hear the founder stories. So Jake, why don’t you introduce yourself to our listeners and then we can talk a little bit about what you’ve been building for the last little bit.
Why Jake Built Shiftwerx
Jake (0:25): Yeah, thanks Jeremy. I appreciate you having me on. So I’m building something called Shiftworks, or actually it’s built and out there right now. ah Many years ago, I was a restaurant manager and it was actually my first job out of college. I was a server in college and when I came out, they said, well, you have a business degree. Why not just do management for a little bit? We understand you’ll probably go somewhere else later, but it’s a great foot in the door into the business world. And it definitely was in the restaurant group that I was in was fantastic. And I learned a lot. One of the first jobs that I had was go and find a new restaurant scheduling software. I thought, okay, great. Because I was the scheduling manager and I was writing it on just an Excel spreadsheet and it was a nightmare. We didn’t have that many employees, but when you get to around 20, 30, including back in the house, it could be 40, 50 employees, even at a modest sized restaurant. The different. permutations of ways that you can write a schedule are almost limitless. ah A fun stat is if you have a one week schedule, AM and PM, you need two people on each shift and you have three employees, there’s more ways to write that schedule. There’s more permutations than there are words in a King James Bible. So yeah, when you get to like 50 people, it’s more than like atoms in the universe or something crazy. So especially as a new manager, the first time I wrote a schedule, my phone just blew up.
Jeremy Julian (1:21): Yes. Wow.
Jake (1:47): with people saying, uh, you, can’t get my kids. Um, no, I can’t pay my bills. That wasn’t enough. I always have Thursdays. My regulars are always on Thursdays and now they’re not going to be there. And I was so stressed out the first time I wrote it. And I had so many calls and phone calls and my boss called me and said, Hey, all right, I’m in your corner. I’m going to help you get this all cleared up. But I always had underestimated just how difficult it is to try to make everybody happy, try to hit what the store needs. And it’s so easy to look at a schedule as an employee and go, oh, this is easy. Like, why didn’t they put, you know, Megan on that Wednesday and me on the Thursday? But in reality, it’s actually a very difficult problem solve. So I went to check out all of these different software solutions. tried to write a schedule with them and they were just hard. What it was doing was it was just digitizing a manual process. You know, an analogy I would like is if somebody saw somebody washing dishes in a sink. and wanted to create a dishwasher, what you wouldn’t want to do is to create a dishwasher box with places to put your arms in, scrub the dishes inside. Like that’s not a dishwasher. That’s just automating the manual pro or that’s just digitizing the manual process. So that’s what I typically saw that they were solving things which didn’t need to be solved. For instance, a manager might write in a four to 10 o’clock in a cell, but the software lets you drag and drop.
Jeremy Julian (2:53): Yeah.
What Actually Keeps Managers Up at Night
Jake (3:11): But no manager is kept up at night or is, you know, stressed out by phone calls. How come you didn’t drag and drop my shift for next week? No, it’s how come you didn’t meet the preferences that I needed? How come I didn’t hit the number of shifts that I expected to pay my bills or whatever else? That’s the difficult problem. And that’s what I figured we really needed to solve. So, um, the original sketch for what became shift works, and this is probably 10, 12 years ago now, at least. is when my boss said, oh, come on, you’re being a little bit picky. Choose the best one. Well, you know what, what would you do? And I thought, oh, I’ll tell you what I would do. And I started to describe what became the basic idea for Shiftworks and the core pieces. And the first one that I ended up implementing was, um, we need to gather all the preference data. So I sent out a little sheet to all the servers and hosting everybody in the restaurant. I said, all right, here are a few color markers. want you to mark something red. you can’t work it yellow, if you can, but you don’t want to, which is a crucial bit of information. Green, if you’d be happy. And then now in my software, I also have blue, which means this is my favorite and you get to pick up to two and you get preference to get those slots. And then I built that into a big spreadsheet so I could see it and see all the preferences right in front of me without having to consult notes. And then it counted off how many shifts that I actually had to hit. And that helped the chaos so much. And people were actually legitimately happy. And the other thing was, I’m a big fan of economics. I study economics a lot, involved in a lot of things there. um I understand that there’s revealed preferences when you make a trade. That sometimes you don’t really know exactly what you want until you’re presented with certain options and the ability to agree with somebody else in a trade. And trades are incredibly hard with shifts because you’re basically stuck in the stone age of barter. And you have all the problems that are associated there. I’ll trade with you, Jeremy, if you trade with Susie and Susie can trade with Fred and it just falls apart. And then things aren’t always equal. A Tuesday night and a Friday night, um or the shift on Thanksgiving and then another random Thursday. They’re not equivalent. So I thought, well, if we had an in-app currency. And we could have a real market so people could save up to get a vacation, sell off their shifts. Somebody could sell a shift here and there. There’s problems with doing that with real currency because there’s perverted incentives where somebody wants to lobby for more shifts just to liquidate them. But we can design a really slick market that can benefit everybody and allow people to be able to deal with all those edge cases in their schedule as cars break down as. as finals weeks come in, as uh bills need to be paid, they can start to…
Jeremy Julian (6:07): Yeah, kids get sick and can’t go to school. You got to stay home for it. Yeah, very much so. I love that. I love that idea. And one of the things that I love about talking to Founders Shake is that you’re scratching your own itch. You’re solving a problem that truly was a pain point for you. And so you live this every, every day when you were a restaurant manager trying to build these shifts. And so before I go there, I want to tell a quick story. And a lot of, a lot of long-term listeners have heard this. I think every, every, um, I, Adolescent and guess young adult should probably have to work in public, you know in a public setting and I think restaurants are a great place to do it uh My son my 18 year old son just recently got a job with the local restaurant local barbecue place up the road and All of the same things that you’re saying to me. He said well, normally they scheduled me on Saturdays But they didn’t schedule me on Saturdays this week, but they scheduled me a double on Sundays I don’t quite understand why I’m working a double on Sundays and not working Saturdays and back and forth and back and forth and And as a scheduling manager, it’s so hard to keep all of that in your head to your point, because there’s so many different permutations. I guess, Jake, before we dig into kind of the bartering and the shift swapping, how at a holistic level do you map out in your software what is needed? Because even that 30 minutes, and we talk a lot of times on the show about kind of, know, prime cost being labor and food cost labor being one of the larger ones, you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got enough people to serve the guests. but not too much that you’re costing yourself too much money. And so I’d love to talk through how do you work with different brands to understand what is needed based on both sales volume as well as minimum coverages as you alluded to when we were kind of talking just a minute ago.
The Surge Problem With Cutting Staff
Jake (7:49): Yeah, that’s a really good question. I thought a lot about it initially. And my initial idea was great. We’ll just grab some sales data out of the POS. We’ll find out the distribution. We’ll get a feel for the total amount that we can hit. We’ll come up with a confidence interval based on how much the sales varies over a Wednesday to a Wednesday to a Wednesday. We’ll apply the relevant statistics. We’ll do that. And I almost built that, but I decided not to. And I’m glad I didn’t because in talking to, um, numerous restaurant managers, a lot of them have interfaced with this. And one story that popped up was as I was presenting the software, the guy said, hang on, hang on. You don’t like figure out how many shifts I need. Cause the current one doesn’t take into account that I have a stoplight up the road. So what a thousand dollar hour looks like for another restaurant, nice and smooth is not what it looks like for my staff. It’s a surge. It’s a surge. It’s a surge. um I talked to a Panera restaurant manager who said, ours tries to do that and it’s cut it down to three hour shifts for my staff. And the fact is my people just churn out when we give them three hour shifts. It looks great on paper. It can save labor, but in reality, I know that there’s more to the story than that. And it also cut down their labor so much that it’s true. You might need uh nine people on your line to deal with that crazy lunch surge.
Jeremy Julian (9:08): Mm-hmm.
Jake (9:18): But if you cut them immediately, then that surge also depleted your entire prep for the day. And you actually need to reallocate that labor to get ready for dinner, which might be equally large. So what I’ve heard from managers, I’d be open to building something and Hey, we, got some tricks up our sleeve. But what I heard most often was that the managers themselves had a really good feel for how many people they needed when they needed them. And the other factor that was huge was which people to have. One of the restaurants I worked at on uh Sundays, they scheduled these two guys and they were paid twice what everybody else was. It was an Applebee’s. We normally had a seven line, a seven person line staffed up for like a Friday or Saturday. We could put two of them on. That’s it. And they could handle that huge Sunday shock immediately. You just give them all the supplies they need and they can execute it. when a five man line couldn’t. So they knew that, hmm, if I put this person in this person, they can do it. So that’s one solution that I was, I really thought about putting in and I would if the customers wanted it. However, from just what I’ve heard from restaurant managers, I feel like I don’t actually have the data relevant to make a decision better than a competent manager.
Jeremy Julian (10:42): love that. Well, and one of the things that I keep hearing as a thread through the conversation, Jake, is the fact that you think about the quality of the life experience for the staff member as well as the management staff. Knowing that you need to have happy team members, because if you don’t have happy team members, they’re not going to show up for their shifts. They’re going to call out sick more often, even if they’re not sick. And we all know everybody that’s listening here that runs a restaurant or has been involved in restaurants, number one, turnover is extremely high. Number two, They struggle to get people to come in in general from a hiring practice perspective. so ensuring that you’ve got the right people on the line, you’ve got the right people in those positions is huge. And so I guess let’s work through a little bit of that now, Jake, is this, so you think about that, how do you qualitatively and quantitatively put that into the system so that the managers can pick and pull, or is it just a, because one of the dilemmas that I found, and I guess I’m going to challenge you with this is, that manager is off sick for a week or he’s on vacation when schedules need to get produced. Now what happens? You knew running that, know, that Applebee’s after 90 days or six months that you could run a Sunday with those two guys or those two kitchen team members. But now you leave that store and you get moved to another store. Now what happens to that? And so you’ve got to make sure that you keep some of this data in the system. So I’d just love to ask you, Jake, how are you managing that on both sides of the equation?
What Happens When Someone Calls Out Sick
Jake (12:04): Yeah. So let’s say somebody goes, goes out sick. What we retain in the software is a record of the previous schedules. So the manager has to write it that week, could start with just a template that’s pulled from previous and then modified as needed. We can also keep all those core people who always run ah those shifts. Let’s say there’s two cooks who have to be there on Sunday. Those wouldn’t be things which get moved around. There’s a lock function. So as you’re building the schedule. You have a bunch of tools at your disposal. They’re all visible right there. Clear buttons, easy labeled. A uh quick digression. My 91 year old grandfather found the app in the iStore, downloaded it and called me to say, this is easy. I could do it. So oftentimes software is written and thought about very deeply only by developers and never by users. And um I think one of our strategies was to
Jeremy Julian (12:50): That’s awesome. Mm-hmm.
Writing a Schedule Without Experience
Jake (13:02): incorporate people who have never written a schedule and have them look over the shoulder and from the start say, go for it, do it, try to figure it out. And if they can’t, we fail. So you have certain tools like the lock function where you just drag and select the shifts that you want to lock and hit lock. And then that copies it to the next schedule so that your core players, you can make sure that they continue. And then once you lock those, you hit auto schedule and bang, everything’s written around it.
Jeremy Julian (13:11): Mm-hmm.
Jake (13:30): Or if you hit auto schedule and go, Ooh, bartender schedule, that looks great. Then you just hit the freeze button and they all go blue. And then those are frozen because those are good for the week. You hit auto schedule again, you go, Oh, I like that permutation of the servers or I like that permutation of that, which, that’s another neat thing. This does, this is not an AI algorithm. Uh, this is an actual deterministic algorithm in the sense that it is hard coded. Um, so we don’t have to worry about hallucinations or the context window got a little bit messy and it just dropped something out or AI had its own little idea about what was fair, which it does all the time. had to lock AI in a box for dealing with the algorithm, but it does include a bit of random noise. So when you hit auto schedule, everybody has a real chance at getting all the shifts they want. However, they’re biased towards getting it.
Jeremy Julian (14:09): Mm-hmm.
Star Ratings and Shift Preferences
Jake (14:27): By two factors. One is their star rating, which the manager does and no employee can see. And that would be, yeah, this is a really good player. They’re vital to the team. They have a great attitude. We really like them. We want to preference them. Maybe there’s seniority, whatever you think should be built into that. You add that rating. And then the flex score is it looks at the scarcity of the different shifts that the restaurant’s dealing with. And if there’s some people who open up their availability. match with the store needs, then they get a little bit of a bump up. And if you have somebody who says, Nope, I just work on Friday and Saturday nights when I make the most money and everything else hard. No, I can’t do it. Come on. Can you do a Wednesday morning? No, I can’t. They’re not being a team player. So this actually cultivates a staff, which knows that they get a better and better schedule as they do two things. They work hard, they’re great employee and two, They open up their availability to match what the store needs. And you can tune those two little knobs so you can max it one week and be like, you know what? My good players are rocking. Everybody else is being awful. Bang auto schedule. And now it preferences that. But the random noise allows you to see iteration after iteration. So to come back to the start of the question, you have that manager who has to do it. The other guy was gone that week and he always does it. You have all of the locked shifts of all the core players. You have the previous week you can look at and you can copy the template from. You can also maybe not write the perfect schedule, but you can probably recognize the perfect schedule. So you can click auto schedule as many times as you want and you can go, Oh, this is good. No, that’s good. Ooh, that’s even better. Ooh, I like that one. And then if you want to make little tweaks, it’s super easy because down at the bottom, you have a counter of every type of shift you need. How many of them you need. And how many you have and it turns green when you have the right amount. So you can just click and cycle through whichever ones you want. And then you can see that you get the right number and then over to the right hand side, you can see all the names of your staff and how many shifts they would like to have that week. So you might think, ah, they’re kind of in the red because they don’t have many. You know what? Let’s give them this Monday shift. Boom. Turn screen down below, turn screen over on the side. And then it’s all color coded. All the data is in your field of view to write a good schedule. So even if you haven’t done it before, it’s going to be pretty easy with the tools we have. Oh, and then let’s say you completely ruin it. All right. Let’s say you hit all the wrong buttons. Somehow you mess it up. Somebody comes in to just sabotage your day. Okay. And you publish the worst schedule ever. That’s where we have the shift market.
Jeremy Julian (17:04): That’s amazing. Oh.
Jake (17:21): where people say, I can’t do this one. So they put their Thursday up for sale. I’ll give you, they can either do it a buy it now or an auction and set a reserve price. And then it goes until the day that it is. It is, it’s like a full-blown market. And not only that, from the manager’s perspective, you never want to be surprised on your Friday night when you find out that your five-star crew all swap their shifts with their worst people. So you can just select for the market settings.
Jeremy Julian (17:30): Wow. You got like an eBay for shift. That’s pretty cool.
Jake (17:48): Yeah, I don’t want anybody with more than a one star gap taking the place. Or you can say, if it’s more than a one star gap, it comes to me for approval first. It doesn’t auto execute. So you can just let them then sort it all out in the market. So it doesn’t matter how bad of a schedule you wrote. uh The market can then take care of it by intelligently having everybody swap according to all the interests that they and only they know in cooperation with everybody else. And when you do have that whiny employee who goes, how come I didn’t get this? How come I didn’t get that? You could say, well, why don’t you go ahead and pick up some shifts that people need to have picked up this week. And then um I see on the market that Fred is trying to sell this Friday night. And if you took the Tuesday and Monday from Carrie and Bob, you could just buy that one. It’s like there’s a path for you to do that. If you help other people, then you get to be helped.
Jeremy Julian (18:44): uh I love that concept and I’d love to dig a little bit deeper, but before we go there, Jake, tell me a little bit more about kind of just the AI and hallucinations, because almost everybody that gets on the show within 10 minutes talks about how AI is going to change the world. And I love your philosophy on that. And really, guess, maybe even explain what a hallucination is and why you guys have been really careful to not utilize AI in the ways that it can harm the restaurant brand and the employee experience. Because I do think it’s something that too few people consider because they want to get a prototype out and they launch and then they go, oh crap, I just got myself into some legal trouble. I just cut myself into some trouble where I’m not getting the desired end results. Cause I just hear too many people that are relying on AI without the background and the knowledge of what it can do incorrectly, not intentionally, but just, you as you said, it sounds really confident when it comes out of that. the box and and unfortunately with an untrained eye you you you lose the opportunity to do that.
Why Deterministic Rules Beat AI for Scheduling
Jake (19:45): Oh yeah. So AI is going to change the world. It is very powerful. It’s all of these things. We’re, we’re users of AI. Most every single major AI we deploy in different ways. Very important. But, um there’s certain times where you don’t want something which uses statistical reasoning. You want something which uses determinate reasoning. um And you got to know what to use and when. For instance, we have the rapid start tool. So if you want to start Shiftworks tomorrow, we tell most people you can probably migrate to our platform and write your first schedule faster than you can write your schedule in your current software. Because you can take a picture of your schedule, load in your Excel document, put it in, and we have Opus 4.7. Read it, break it down into our defined categories, and then feed it into your account to make all of your staff And all of their information and anything that you included in the schedule, how many shifts you need for a Tuesday, which are opening and this and that it does a pretty darn good job guessing that. But we understand that that’s a guess. So this is a rapid start. This isn’t the you’re ready to go tool. And because it’s non it’s statistical inference, it’s not all deterministic stuff. You can’t rely on it a hundred percent of the time. Um, so it can give you a leg up. And that’s where we use it. But when it comes to actually writing a schedule, if you feed in the data that we have on all the preference of everyone, um it does two things. One is sometimes it drops information. Sometimes it adds information. So both of those are kind of type of a hallucination where it’s thinking of something which you didn’t intend it to think about. The other issue is uh your priorities might not be its priorities. One of the things which it constantly wanted to build into our algorithm and we had to stop it from was uh fairness modifiers, which were ongoing. And the thing is restaurants are meritocratic. If you can do 10 tables and everybody’s super happy and you’re helping everybody and running food and you’re amazing, then you deserve more shifts and the best shifts. And if you’re, you have a terrible attitude and all your customers are angry, then
Jeremy Julian (21:47): Yeah.
Jake (22:08): You’re headed towards being fired, but you’re certainly not headed towards the best shifts at the best times out competing your servers who are the core of your restaurant. So to put in some type of meritocratic code or fix is going to ruin your effectiveness as a brand. It’s not an upgrade. And because when you’re writing software, we have a lot of code, there’s a lot of places for this to hide. Um, you might not be able to even know. If you’ve employed AI to do an auto scheduling type of task, what it’s doing, how it’s thinking, or what the outcomes are. When we built ours, we had a huge source of truth file. We interrogated it. We uh ran multiple tests. So we had like a thousand round test and found the distribution of all the outcomes. And we tuned how that star rating and how that flex score. um is going to match the distribution of outcomes in a way which is going to feel intuitive to the user. So when you select uh high star influence, low star influence, whatever high and low means to an average person is what we’ve tuned into that algorithm. And we don’t want AI to touch it. So AI can be great. We’ve used it in a lot of coding, a lot of repetitive coding tasks. We can also translate between 30 languages. We’re implementing that now. So if you have Spanish speakers or Cantonese speakers or whatever speakers you have, when they get on, they see everything in their native language. They communicate in their native language, and then you get it in your preferred language. And we use a combination there, kind of to your point about AI being useful at some points and having weaknesses, we use a combination of determinate tools and AI tools. Something like um you want to hit the help button. Okay.
Jeremy Julian (23:45): That’s awesome.
Jake (24:01): That’s great. Just help equals this in Croatian. Perfect. Cheap, fast, always correct. But if you say, come on, Jeremy, you’re pulling my leg. Oh, we need an AI to look through the context and give a more dynamic translation of what exactly that means in your native tongue. So we split it up in that. um Another great use of AI is our help function where it’s super easy to use. You should be fine, but let’s say you don’t know how to use something in the software. You don’t have to call somebody and wait on the line. We built uh training uh materials directly from the code in a big repository. And you can go into help and you’re talking to, in this case, I you’re using grok. So it’s because it’s quite fast and it gives you nice snappy responses and it tends to have a low hallucination rate. So it reads all of our source files for how to do every function in the software. If you say, Hey, how do I change Bob’s uh
Jeremy Julian (24:31): Uh huh.
Jake (25:01): preference data, if Bob’s phone broke, you just ask it in about two or three seconds. goes bang, go to this page, click this, do that. You can say, I can’t find it. Here’s what my screenshot of this looks like. And you can talk to it and it knows everything about the software and it can guide you through everything step by step, like a person could if they had all the books open about how the software worked. That’s a great word.
Jeremy Julian (25:25): I love that. Yeah, I really love the way you guys have thought about this. So thanks for digging into that. And I guess educating our listeners, because I think all too often everybody, you know, actually dealing with a restaurant brand right now that’s like, you know, the executives are like, Hey, we need everything with AI. And the IT staff is like, come on guys, you need to think about this because it’s going to steer you down the wrong path. And then you’re going to blame the system and this is going to be the system’s fault instead of the educated operator going no. Having 12 people on the line on a Friday at 10 p.m. when the restaurant’s about to close probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because things like that will happen. It’s not, you know, if you ask it again a second time, I’m gonna be like, oh yeah, you’re right. I did make a mistake and it goes back. And I think we’ve all been at that place where at least anybody uh that’s dug into the uh AI world is you go, are you sure that this answer’s right? And it goes, oh no, you’re right. I missed this data point or whatever. So thanks for sharing a little bit of that. Let’s dig in a little quick real quick, Jake, before we before we wrap and give our listeners an opportunity to engage with you guys. Talk to me a little bit about the marketplace. I think that’s such a novel concept. and you talked about the fact that that you’ve got to be really careful not to have it be true monetary, um you know, funds, I guess, transferring to be able to buy a show from somebody. But you guys came up with some different ways to go about that. I just thought it was a unique spin on things that I hadn’t heard of before. So I guess. Walk me through a little bit of why it wasn’t, me buy your ship for 20 bucks versus, know, cause I grew up in the restaurants. I, this is where I started before I came here. And so I remember going, Hey dude, I need that Friday night. Cause I need to be able to go buy my girlfriend, you know, flowers for Valentine’s day. I really need to work that shift. And so you would figure out how to get that shift. This is well before tools like you built existed. was uh a piece of paper written on in the, the, in the office. But I guess talk me through both the philosophy and how you’ve seen it impact. impact the different brands that you guys have been working with.
Why Scheduling Exists in the First Place
Jake (27:16): Yeah. So, I mean, the original reason why mankind invented money was because there’s certain goods, which you can’t just break apart and divide. If you have a cow to give you milk and then somebody else has, I don’t know, a new spear for you. You gotta be like, ah, that’s worth 12 spears, but I can’t give you one 12th of my dairy cow. Cause if I pull his leg off, you don’t get milk from that. No, I don’t either. And ah, darn it. So you need something that’s divisible to allow. uh things which are incommensurate in value to be traded nonetheless. The other thing you need is uh trades across time because you might not want to buy something now, but you know that you will need to buy something at some point. Same with selling things. um And then also the three-way, four-way trade problem becomes unbelievably complicated and very difficult to police. And managers know this that Well, how come I don’t have, you know, a server for, you know, this section over here? Well, I, I told Katie that she would take it from me. Well, I said that, and then you have to unravel this giant text chain when instead, if you just have in the market log, Carrie switched to this one. Bang. That’s it. We have the transaction is publicly logged. It’s very clear. It’s enforceable and we know what’s going on. Um, so that’s what we tried to solve. We do have a few other things that this does, and this is really neat. Let’s say a manager wants to give an incentive to their staff. Yeah, they can bonus.
Jeremy Julian (28:50): where it was going to go. was going to say, there bonus points that people can get for different things that they’re doing? They got certified on something. They worked a double when they weren’t scheduled for a double. Whatever. The manager can throw points at them. Sorry, I’ll let you keep going through that. I thought that was kind of a… If it wasn’t a feature, I was going to throw it at you and say, throw that in there because that’d be cool.
Jake (29:04): Oh yeah. In addition to that. Oh yeah. So in the schedule, let’s say you’re scheduling and you’re like, everybody hates Sunday morning. I have to put somebody on Sunday morning. Everybody’s upset. Everybody’s yellow that day. There’s no green, which means they want to work. Nope. It’s all yellow. uh You can go in your schedule and go incentivize 50 bang. Anybody who gets scheduled gets credited that. So when somebody goes, why did you schedule me on the Monday morning on the Sunday morning? You go, Hey, I did do that. But just so you know, there is a shift coin incentive, which means you have the power to get rid of a shift you don’t want or to get one that you do in the marketplace or to use it for other rewards. So I kind of made you whole. And that’s one way that you can, you can incentivize people to do it. The other way is, or one of the other huge features is we have a messaging platform built in. And sometimes it feels like a. tacked on feature to something which is otherwise focused, but this is heavily integrated into specifically the market because everybody knows that when you send your staff a email, nobody reads your email. Nobody, they’re off work. They’re not going to read the email. Oh, I did a Slack. Yeah. It got really long and I wasn’t paying attention. I leave that notification off and you don’t really want to have a massive text chain with 20 servers on there. That’s a mess. And now your phone’s going on. So everybody mutes it. Nobody hears it.
Jeremy Julian (30:15): Mm-hmm.
Messaging Staff Actually Read
Jake (30:31): So we need messaging that people actually read and respond to and can be held accountable for, especially when it’s really important things. And the only way to do that is with incentives. They have no incentive right now to read it. So what we can do is say, if you open up the message and go, yes, I read that you get 20 shift coin. So now when they get a notification, we give them a positive reward for going, understand. Now, if it’s something super, super important, Like somebody came in and said, does the pad tie have peanuts? And someone said, no, it doesn’t have any peanuts. Don’t worry about it. And then flops over and has to be hit with the EpiPen. Whoa, that’s serious. Right? Everybody has to know this. So you can go in messenger and say, you can’t use your app until you acknowledge the pad tie has peanuts. Wednesday, we had a medical emergency. I understand this. Bang. You can also put in some training questions and training materials. So you can go through that real quick. Hey, quick menu update. This now has cilantro in it, garnish it accordingly. Got it. I understood. Bang. I earned 20 shift coin right there. And then they get a record of everybody who actually read that message so that they can hold people accountable to that information. And it can save restaurant owners huge amounts of money in in-store meetings. Cause you have an hour meeting. That’s a lot of money you’re spending for all the staff. It’s a logistical nightmare. Half of the meeting is just hurting all the people in and, okay, guys, yep, all right, we’re here today with this. And then you get maybe a few minutes of focused information. A lot of those can completely be removed with Shift Message because you have a market that they can then deploy those coins in. And because we have an app that we can block out the use until you acknowledge a safety concern, for instance. um Yeah, so the market’s something which it handles the edge cases. can also handle call-outs incredibly well. Somebody doesn’t show up, you just go, whoa, the manager goes, 200 shift coin for the first person who shows up. And everybody who’s not scheduled and is in the role that they can work that goes, 200 shift coin to show up now. If I hit a first, I get 200. Now let’s look at the market. Ooh, Cindy’s selling her Friday night for 100. And I bet you I could get rid of my Monday if I paid somebody 75. So if I take this today, I make this money, I make next Friday’s money and I lose my two, done. Now everybody’s given an incentive and you’re not begging people, come on, I promise I’ll give you a good schedule next time if you please take this one. Well, I can’t, cause then I’ll be over into, nope, nope. You take care of that right there with the market, with an incentive that goes exactly to the people who want to see it.
Jeremy Julian (33:21): I love that. And quite frankly, historically what that would turn into for many of our listeners out there is the managers now have to intercede and sending out the group message saying, Jake, I really need you to come in, man. I know you’re not scheduled, but I’m dying here. Can you figure it out? Now he’s off the floor. He’s not dealing with guests. He’s not dealing with the staff members. And he’s trying to fill that shift versus, I don’t say, I the free market addressing it itself and that whole idea. That’s such a cool concept. And so thank you for sharing that.
Jake (33:50): And you know, and you know, it, it’s situations like that and situations where you’re scheduling and you know that I can put this shift on Carrie and she will work it right. And it does fill a need and she always takes one for the team here, or you have somebody you call who always shows up. Um, there’s certain key employees who are helping you. And right now the incentives are basically whether you like it or not to burn them out.
Jeremy Julian (34:19): Mm-hmm.
Jake (34:19): And you, and every restaurant owner or manager knows that morale is not like some little tack on extra our industry. That’s what everything runs on. That’s a lubricates all the gears. Like I don’t care how angry the person was who, I don’t know, put the wheels on my car when it was manufactured. He could have been as angry as he wanted to. If the wheels got on the wheels got on, but when you have a customer facing role, And somebody’s a little bit annoyed that day, a little bit peeved that affects your bottom line directly. And you’re not going to see that repeat customer when everybody is happy and working and you have that teamwork and you feel like you’re just kind of riding the beast and there’s a flow and a vibe to the restaurant. And you’re just surging and everybody’s flowing. That is the best feeling. And managers know that, that that just feels like all cylinders are firing and everybody’s happy and the best restaurant. um staff, kitchen, servers, hosts, bartenders actually enjoy that feeling. And those morale issues, which break up the team, cause people to have animosity, anger, suspicion of the manager for always playing favorites, um feeling like they’re just being put upon constantly with everybody else’s call out or special schedule constraint that ruins that flow and that teamwork. And it just… degrades your team and your business in total. So when somebody gets a bad schedule, you can personally blame me, hey, shift works, came up with that. But in reality, you really do have the tools to avoid that from ever happening. And when somebody asks, why did I get a shift like this? You can tell them, hey, we have an algorithm that tries to get everything the store needs so that we function smoothly. It takes into account how many shifts you want, which shifts you want. And everybody’s preferences. And it tries to build one that works for the entire team as best as possible. And yeah, there’s a little bit of randomness in there so that the same people don’t win again and again and again. And so that everybody has a real shot to get the shifts that they want. And when you don’t, and sometimes we can’t make everybody happy, you have a way to trade and communicate with everybody else in order to get as close to it as possible. So we’re really using every tool at our disposal to keep our entire team engaged, morale high, and getting the best players in the door for every shift.
Jeremy Julian (36:43): Mm-hmm. Well, and I think that the other thing that you said there without saying it, Jake, is the fact that you’ve give them a sense of control over their own destiny. They can control whether they’re working a Friday night. We’re recording this in the middle of graduation season. You know, Mother’s Day was just this past weekend. There’s a lot going on and a lot of people have travel. A lot of people have things going on. This sense of control, because all too often what operators struggle with is this. I was put upon to work Tuesday night at the worst station and now I’m stuck. really wanted to go, you I really had something scheduled. It was my mom’s birthday. I really need to do this, but now they’ve got control of that and an ability to serve themselves with the rest of the staff, with management, you know, assistance. So Jake, how do people get engaged? What does it look like to start? I love your quick start idea. So talk us through, how do they engage with the team? What does that look like for them? And kind of what types of restaurants are you looking to serve? out in the marketplace. If I’m sitting here listening 36, 37 minutes in going, what are you saying is amazing? How do I get a demo? How do I see this? How do I get rolling?
Trying Shiftwerx
Jake (37:56): Perfect. Yeah. So we have a number of videos to see everything in action and we actually didn’t even get to all the features it has. There’s more. And I think hopefully as the listeners have heard them, they kind of work together. They’re all meant to be one system that works smoothly together. uh But check out the website, is Shift works. So it’s w e r x.com. You can see some of the videos there. There’s also a contact us page. So you can contact us with any questions or if you want to hop on a call and watch a demo, you can absolutely do that. We also have a 30 day free trial. So you don’t have to take our word for it. You can hop on today. So go to shiftworks.com W E R X and you can just hit, it for free. Use the rapid start tool and load your own schedule in and watch it build a schedule. You’ll need to put into the preference data, which is quite easy and quick. And your staff, once you get it out to those guys would do that for you. um And you can just play with it, play with it for 30 days. And if you don’t like it, that’s fine. And if you find anything that’s unclear or not easy to use or a feature that you wished was there, go right back to the site, hit contact us or just email jake at shiftworks.com. And let me know, because we’re trying to build this, not for some theoretical, what, no, no, it’s, I’ve been a restaurant manager at three different restaurants. I’ve helped open a restaurant. Um, I’ve had other, I have other small businesses. know exactly what it’s like to deal with this chaos. And we were trying to target exactly what you’re doing. So if we didn’t do that, let me know. But I think everybody we’ve shown so far, and we’ve been to a lot of, restaurants and retail locations and shown them what we have. And they’ve been really, really excited. If you’re a small team, so under around 20, that would be Spark. So it’s really affordable. And then you can go up to a team of 100 for a professional. If you’re over 100 in your team, we would just come up with a custom solution for you. Often teams that large also have other scheduling constraints that we can build in for you. to match exactly what you need. So you just let us know and we can figure that out for you. Who’s it for? The more scheduling chaos, the better. So for a small team, you’re going to benefit. Even if you have five, six, seven, eight employees, um it’s just going to make uh communication easier. It’s going to make the scheduling go from even if it only took you 10 minutes, because it’s a few people, now it takes you three seconds. The publishing is very clear. Another
Jeremy Julian (40:25): Hmph.
Jake (40:44): problem, is surprisingly frequent and not always solved with a lot of the legacy softwares out there is that when people get their schedule, they often get only the whole schedule and then they have to run their finger along and go, ah, there’s Thursday. I work at four. it’s surprisingly frequent that the finger method fails and they get the wrong day. This for the staff member, shows only the days and then only their shifts. And if they want to view the whole schedule, they can do that. But the default is what they see is exactly when they work with today’s date highlighted as clear as possible. So we try to make everything clear labeled, color coded, hit the help icon. If you don’t know how to do it, email me if there’s anything confusing, but I think most, especially if you’re a manager who spends a long time and you really care about staff and whichever, I’m sure most of your listeners do. um It’s going to, it’s going to save you a ton of time. It’s going to save you a lot of headache. And I think you’re going to see it hit your bottom line pretty quick on the website. We give a sample ROI calculator where we look at things like how many all store meetings can you save? um How many um turnover events with your staff could be avoided? um How many hours does the manager save every week? And we kind of took a good guess for like a 65 person restaurant, what it might look like. And you can kind of look at your own numbers and see if this is something that’s going to make your business more competitive. Cause at the end of the day, that’s what matters. know, everybody, uh everybody’s in this to ultimately get something to the bottom line. Cause if that doesn’t happen, the entire, the entire train stops. So we think it’s not just something that makes your life easier. It’s going to make your, business a lot smoother, add to the bottom line. And what we really hope is.
Jeremy Julian (42:29): Yeah.
Scheduling as a Competitive Edge
Jake (42:40): that our customers see this as a competitive edge for staff morale, for recruitment, for training. And I’ll kind of add one more feature as we’re kind of wrapping it up. um If you have more than one location, then Shiftworks can look into the database and see the other published schedules that you’ve linked with. And when you hit auto schedule, it will avoid double booking your staff. So if you’re in a restaurant group or
Jeremy Julian (43:07): That’s awesome.
Jake (43:09): Let’s say there’s another restaurant that you just know that they use Shiftworks to, or you just have a lot of staff in both locations, then there’s no more of this, oh no, my other manager booked me at, nope, we can take care of that. um Also, if you need to request staff from another sister organization, you can go directly in that and it goes right through the platform and it makes it seamless to be able to cover stuff in your restaurant from partner restaurants that use Shiftworks.
Jeremy Julian (43:39): Yeah, well, and nobody opened up a restaurant to have to build a schedule. Like at the end of the day, it’s a necessary part, but they didn’t open up the restaurant and go, oh, I want to sit in the office for three hours a week to build out the schedule. And so the fact that you guys are helping with that is amazing. And I always love people that have personal experience with the pain and suffering before they created a solution. So Jake, thank you for doing that. I know we only touch the surface of kind of what you guys are building, but I’m excited to continue to see the growth.
Jake (43:42): Yeah, that’s it. Well put.
Jeremy Julian (44:05): To our listeners guys, like I said at the onset, know you guys got lots of choices. So thank you guys for hanging out. Jake, thank you for creating what you guys have done. Please to our listeners, go check them out and make it a great day.
Jake (44:16): Thank you, Jeremy.
