Castle's Family Restaurant: Hr Assessment

Castle's Family Restaurant: HR assessment

Business assessment

Castle's Family Restaurant is a relatively small chain of eight restaurants in the Northern California area with approximately 300-340 employees. The restaurant is not a franchise and there is a single, joint HR/operations manager for all eight restaurants. The restaurants are casual businesses that are mainly designed to serve families for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They make a profit by serving a high volume of customers in a short period of time. The employees on the payroll include servers and cooks, managers, and other staff such as busboys and cleaning staff. Employees are 40% part time, and tend to be relatively short-term in their employment.

Keeping a tight reign on unnecessary expenditures is necessary for Castle's, like most enterprises in the hospitality industry. Profit margins are razor thin, particularly during slow times of the year. There is also the constant risk of spoilage of food, and the constant need to train new workers in a volatile, high-turnover employment sector. The schedule and total hours of workers change very quickly from week to week, depending on availability and also the time of year.

Identified problems

The cost of gasoline has been increasing nationwide, but in California it is particularly prohibitive. Because of the consolidated nature of HR, Jay Morgan, the operations and HR manager must travel a far distance. Doing payroll individually using an Excel spreadsheet and printing payroll checks from a single source is costly in terms of time and resources for Castle's, as Morgan must travel to each location to manage scheduling, recruiting, hiring, and answering questions for the employees as needed. Some hands-on management will always be necessary, given the need to inspect the facilities for cleanliness, to ensure that the business is run in an ethical fashion (which can be an issue in the hospitality sector) and also to motivate workers, given the transient nature of much of the staff. Because all of the restaurants have the same name, a bad experience of a customer at one Castle's will affect the business of other Castle's so Morgan must exercise a certain amount of hands-on supervision. However, despite this, the degree of 'busywork' management that Morgan is currently performing in person should be shifted to a more technologically forward, modern approach

HRIS needs assessment

Of the essential functions of management, the 'controlling' function is the one which could be most easily addressed with an HRIS, and is essential to implement, to reduce expenditures. A "Human Resource Information System (HRIS) is a software or online solution for the data entry, data tracking, and data information needs of the Human Resources, payroll, management, and accounting functions