With the National Living Wage set to rise on 1st April, workforce management experts Bizimply are offering hospitality operators a National Living Wage Calculator, as an easy way to work out the cost of the increase to their business.
Operators can download a free, simple to use spreadsheet from the Bizimply website and populate it with each employee’s date of birth and current hourly wage. This will show whether a pay increase is due in April, and if so, how much. For existing Bizimply customers, all the information can be easily transferred from current employee files, meaning the whole process takes only minutes.
Bizimply CEO Conor Shaw said: “The increase in the National Living Wage is going to have a massive impact on hospitality businesses, but working out exactly what that will be can be complex and time-consuming, especially for multi-site operators.
“That’s why we’ve created this simple calculator, which makes it easy for operators to see how much their wage bill will go up by in April. It’s vital information that every business should have – and the further ahead they have it, the better they can plan.”
The National Living Wage Calculator can be downloaded free of charge from Bizimply’s website. The National Living Wage is set to rise by 6.2% in April and will undoubtedly push up labour costs for many hospitality businesses. The increase is from £8.21 to £8.72 for workers over 25, and from £7.70 to £8.20 an hour for those aged 21-24.
The rise in the NLW comes at a time of the lowest unemployment levels in the UK for decades, creating a challenging environment for hospitality employers. Added to this, the Government’s decision to deny working visas to ‘low skilled’ workers, and the possibility that EU nationals in the UK – who make up an estimated 15% of the hospitality workforce – may return home, will add further pressures to labour supply.
Shaw says: “The reality for most hospitality businesses for 2020 and beyond is rising labour costs and a shrinking, and transient, workforce. These may feel like ‘bigger than us’ factors outside any individual operator’s control, but in our experience, the opposite is true.
“The solution is to have the right team members working in your business, at the right time, and making sure they’re motivated to deliver memorable customer service. This is what Bizimply was designed to achieve and we’ve helped many of the hospitality businesses we work with to reduce their labour cost from 35% to less than 30% of turnover.
“Our software helps operators to create staff rotas more efficiently, taking up less time, particularly for the GMs, who are then freed up to spend more time front of house. It also gives team members more advance notice of their schedule, which in turn improves their work-life balance and job satisfaction and means they’ll be more engaged with your business.
“The result is staff teams who enjoy their job, and are receiving hands-on coaching and direction from their GM to deliver the exceptional customer service that encourages return visits. Operators who can create this workplace environment are the ones who will weather the storm of wage increases and staff shortages – and anything else that might be thrown at our industry!”
