Labour cost
How to reduce restaurant overtime without cutting hours
Almost nobody schedules overtime on purpose. It accumulates in the gaps between locations, weeks and managers, and surfaces at payroll — by which point it has been worked and the only question left is how to pay it.
Overtime is a visibility problem wearing a demand costume
The typical path: someone picks up a Tuesday at one location, covers a Saturday at another, and crosses forty hours in a week nobody was totalling. Each individual decision was reasonable. No single manager saw the sum.
This is why “tighten up scheduling” rarely fixes it. The scheduling was fine. The totalling was missing.
What it costs
Only the premium is avoidable — the base pay would have been incurred by whoever worked the shift. At 1.5× on a $16.38 average wage, every overtime hour costs an extra $8.19.
Price your own exposure — it takes about a minute.
The five interventions, in order of cost
1 · Total hours per person across all locations, weekly
Free, and it fixes most of the problem. The number that matters is not hours at this store — it is hours this person, everywhere, this week. If your scheduling is per-site, this number does not exist anywhere.
2 · Move hours before the threshold, not after
Shifting four hours from someone at 44 to a colleague at 32 costs nothing and removes the premium entirely. It only works if you know on Wednesday that the first person is at 44 — which is the whole argument for pricing the rota as it is built.
3 · Set a per-store labour budget the rota is charged against
A budget the schedule consumes as it is built turns an abstract target into a running balance. Most groups forecast the week from sales history and set labour at around 27% of it, inside the 25–30% band.
4 · Publish earlier
Late rotas force last-minute cover, and last-minute cover goes to whoever is available — usually the person already closest to the threshold.
5 · Fix the mapping first
If a chunk of your hours are not costed, your overtime figure is understated the same way your labour percentage is. You cannot manage a threshold you cannot see people approaching.
What to measure afterwards
- Overtime as a share of scheduled hours, per store, weekly — under 5% is well managed
- Individuals within 6 hours of threshold on Wednesday, not Sunday
- Premium paid vs premium projected — the gap tells you whether visibility is being acted on
The overtime radar names every person heading past their threshold, the store and the week, and prices the exposure before the rota is published. A schedule health score grades the period and shows each deduction, so the location costing you the grade is named rather than averaged away.