The Nowsta Blog

This is Part Four of a five-part series for caterers on hiring and managing part-time event staff. You can see the previous parts here: 

• Part One: How to attract more event staff candidates
• Part Two: How to interview event staff candidates
• Part Three: How to onboard new event staff

Caterers need part-time staff in positions like server, bartender, and event chef to ensure their events run smoothly. In my last three articles, I’ve given you my strategies to always be recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding people in these positions.

But there’s another crucial piece of the puzzle: The Event Captains who manage everyone in these roles. Where do they come from? Ideally, they work their way up from the event staff roles we’ve been discussing. The best caterers I’ve worked with tend to promote these folks from within for a few key reasons:

Every employee needs something a little different to do their best work. That was our thesis when we broke part-time employees down into five categories and provided management tips for each, based on Federal Reserve survey data on why people say they work part-time as opposed to full-time. Over a series of posts, we’re going to take a deeper dive into each category and explore how managers can better manage, motivate, and accommodate each type of part-time employee. You can see our previous entry on managing underemployed part-time staff who want more hours here.

In this post, we’re going to cover staff who work part-time due to child care and other family obligations.

At Nowsta, events are our bread and butter. Our scheduling tools are built to help you manage the constant week-to-week variation in shifts, roles, and venue locations that all event-based businesses are familiar with.

But just because you’re in the events industry doesn’t mean that every single shift you schedule is tied to an event. Caterers, for instance, often have staff in their kitchens, warehouses, and cafes who work roughly the same hours each week regardless of how many events are on the schedule. We want to help our customers manage those staff from the Nowsta platform as easily as they do their event staff. That’s why today, we’re excited to announce our newest scheduling tool: Weekly View.

This is Part Three of a five-part series for caterers on hiring and managing part-time event staff. You can read the other parts here: 

• Part One: How to attract more event staff candidates
• Part Two: How to interview event staff candidates
• Part Four: How to promote event staff to Event Captain

Caterers have to approach hiring for part-time event staff as a numbers game. It’s a bit like math class. In my first post, we went over addition, and looked at strategies to increase your number of job applicants. Last week, we got into subtraction and talked about how you can use the interview process to reduce your pool of applicants to the most qualified ones. This week is all about percentages. You want as many of your new hires as possible to make the transition from “new hire” to “go-to event teammate.” How do you do that? Onboarding.

Writing an employee handbook as a manager is a lot like eating vegetables as a kid. It’s good for you in the long run, but there are lots of other things you’d rather do. Your to-do list is probably a mile long and unforeseen challenges pop up every day. Time is at a premium, so it’s easy for something like an employee handbook to fall by the wayside.

But this is an investment in the future that’s worth making time for. The employee handbook is your chance to start every new hire off with a baseline understanding of your company’s culture, expectations, and operations. Below, we’re going to tell you how an employee handbook can help your business, show you what to include in yours, and provide a few examples you can look to as you write your own.  

This is Part Two of a five-part series for caterers on hiring and managing part-time event staff. You can read the others here: 

• Part One: How to attract more event staff candidates
• Part Three: How to onboard new event staff
• Part Four: How to promote event staff to Event Captain

As a caterer, you always need to be hiring more part-time event staff. These are high turnover positions, and seasonality means your needs are always changing -- the last thing you want is to find yourself scrambling for more staff at the last minute.

But at the same time, you can’t just hire anyone who walks through the door to be your next server, bartender, or hostess. These people interact directly with guests, which means they arguably have the biggest overall impact on client experience. You need to know you can trust them with that responsibility. That’s where the interview process comes in.

Every employee needs something a little different to do their best work. That was our thesis when we broke part-time employees down into five categories and provided management tips for each, based on Federal Reserve survey data on why people say they work part-time as opposed to full-time. Over a series of posts, we’re going to take a deeper dive into each category and explore how managers can better manage, motivate, and accommodate each type of part-time employee.

First up: Part-time-staff who need more hours, also known as the visibly underemployed.

This is Part One of a five-part series for caterers on hiring and managing part-time event staff. You can the next parts here: 

• Part Two: How to interview event staff candidates
• Part Three: How to onboard new event staff
• Part Four: How to promote event staff to Event Captain

Most catering companies depend on part-time staff to work their events as servers, bartenders, event chefs, and any other roles that only need to show up during the events themselves. While this arrangement clearly makes sense financially and logistically, it does mean that caterers always need to be in hiring mode for these positions. Part-time staff work other jobs and won’t always be available, so you need to constantly be adding to your pool of workers to ensure you can staff all your events -- especially during your busy season.

Every business owner and manager knows that manually tracking employees’ hours isn’t fun. If you use paper timesheets, you have to pester staff to sign in and out, decipher messy handwriting, and somehow get the data to your payroll provider. Physical timeclocks mitigate some of those issues, but you’re still stuck poring over a stack of paper time cards at the end of each pay period.

Scheduling hourly staff is a difficult balancing act for managers. On the one hand, you have to preserve margins by keeping the schedule lean and assigning only as many people as you need to meet customer demand. That means you sometimes need the flexibility to change the schedule in the days leading up to a shift. On the other hand, employees need flexibility too. Last minute scheduling changes make it harder for them to meet family obligations, work a second job, make it to class, or manage other aspects of their daily lives. But a reasonable shift swap policy can enable managers to meet the needs of both their business and their employees.