Steele at a Glance | by Steele Service Co.

PROUD TO ANNOUNCE:  Steele Service Co. forms strategic partnership with SafetyXperts. HR Buzzword? or Legislated at state and federal level?  Introducing Caylene Vincent & Psychological Workplace Safety.   In our last instalment, Ben broke down "The Labour Percentage Trap, " challenging us to look beyond a single wage metric and ask whether our rostered hours are actually generating maximum productivity and return. But once we shift our focus from merely cutting costs to maximizing value, an obvious operational question follows: how do we actually deploy our people on the floor to capture that value without burning them out or overstaffing during quiet periods? A Powerful New Alliance: Steele Service Co. & SafetyXperts I am thrilled to announce an exciting new chapter for our business: Steele Service Co. has officially joined forces with Caylene Vincent and the exceptional team at SafetyXperts ! This strategic partnership unites Steele Service Co.’s deep c...

  Steele at a Glance | The Labour Percentage Trap: Are We Measuring the Wrong Thing? In our last edition of Steele at a Glance , we looked at moving away from reactive "fill-in-the-blanks" scheduling toward an empowerment-first model taking inspiration from aviation's preferential bidding systems to align shifts with our people's lives and preferences. But even the best-designed, staff-centric roster can fall flat if it’s built on a metric that measures cost without measuring value. That brings us to the single number that has likely dictated more shift decisions than any other: labour percentage . Sales are soft? Check labour. Wages are over budget? Cut a shift. Forecast looks quiet? Send someone home early. Labour percentage is useful, and every operator needs to understand it. But problems start when we treat it as the ultimate grade for whether a roster is actually working. A lower labour percentage doesn't automatically mean a better-run venue, and in fact, c...

  Steele at a Glance | by Steele Service Co. Beyond the Fill-in-the-Blanks Roster: What Hospitality Can Learn from Airline Rostering In our last edition of Steele at a Glance , Ben explored how independent venues could collaborate through shared talent pools and joint training networks—tackling hospitality’s labor challenge by giving great staff access to more hours and clearer career pathways across venues. Building on that idea of rethinking our approach to people power, this week I want to dive into what happens within our own venue walls when we fundamentally change how we construct our rosters. If you’ve ever managed a team in a club or hotel, you’re familiar with the weekly puzzle. The roster opens, the blank shifts stare back at you, and the goal quickly becomes plug-and-play: put a name in every slot until the floor is covered. It gets the job done, but it treats rostering as a purely administrative task rather than what it truly is: a core driver of culture, productivity, ...

  Steele at a Glance by Steele Service Co   From COGS to People Power: Rethinking Hospitality’s Labour Problem In our last instalment, we looked at how independent venues could work together to increase their buying power, lower COGS and create some of the efficiencies that naturally come with scale. But purchasing is only one area where scale matters. Ask most hospitality operators what keeps them awake at night and wages, staffing and retention will be somewhere near the top of the list. Anyone who has written a roster knows the problem. You have a great casual who wants 25 hours a week, but this week you can realistically give them 14 without blowing your wage percentage. You want to keep them, they want to stay, but they also need to pay their bills. So they pick up work somewhere else, and a few months later you’ve lost a good employee and you’re back advertising, interviewing and training someone new. The Staffing Challenge for Independent Venues One of the natural adv...