Your F&B Company’s Best Kept Secret: Time Management & Scheduling

Field teams in the food and beverage industry have their work cut out for them. They are busy taking inventory of their brand’s products, performing quality checks, processing orders, and maintaining relationships between their employers and store clients. There are over 250,000 outlets selling food and beverage products, according to Switzerland Global Enterprise. Wide coverage means reps need to make their store visits without being spread too thin. Follow these tips to find out how reps can use their time most effectively and how managers can maximize efficiency through scheduling.

Making the Most Out of Every Minute – Time Management

In the food and beverage industry, field reps have to complete daily responsibilities while adhering to a strict schedule. However, salespeople spend as much as 21% more time on administration than they did just five years ago, Harvard Business Review reported. This means reps aren’t only focusing on sales, but are handling additional tasks such as building customer relationships and collecting data. Field teams have to adopt effective time management skills to stay on track with their busy schedules.

Better time management will improve supply chain productivity, helping representatives to manage expiration dates on products, avoid overstocking, and address quality issues. When implementing a plan for time efficiency, there are a few important tips to keep in mind:

Organize and plan

Prioritize and focus on key tasks. Have your sales team use lists and planners to help track what needs to be done. With reps spending an increased amount of time on account administration, make sure to plan in extra time for non-selling activities throughout the day. Staying organized will keep reps on top of things and keep them from getting bogged down when switching from one thing to the next.

Offer training sessions

Forty percent of employees who receive poor job training leave their positions within the first year, according to Go2HR. If companies don’t value their employees and help them acquire the skills to succeed, turnover will remain high. Training sessions are great tools to increase engagement with reps and show them that they are valuable assets to the company. In addition, training will increase employee output.

Encourage reps to focus on one task at a time

When reps aren’t focused on one task, productivity decreases by 40% according to Wrike. Have reps concentrate on individual tasks to achieve better results instead of having multiple responsibilities divide their attention. Try making employee checklists to help reps hone their attention on one thing at a time.

Employee Scheduling 

Time management and a concrete schedule go hand and hand. Employees can’t manage their time without a manager’s capacity to divvy out assignments and appointments. For example, waiting is one of the biggest time wasters reps face. A good schedule will maximize productivity and limit misused time.

Food and beverage reps visit around eight stores a day. Managers need to make sure there are enough workers to complete field duties, but not so many where reps are idle. As managers seek to strike this balance there are a number of obstacles in their way:  

Irregular scheduling

Sixty percent of employees in one study reported that their schedules change “a lot” or “a fair amount” from week to week, according to Forbes. Altering schedules to accommodate these shifts puts pressure on managers and other workers. Constant changes make it difficult to implement a regular schedule. Managers must continually edit and alter shifts depending on weekly disruptions.

Employee turnover

Turnover not only affects productivity, but it costs companies time and money. It interrupts normal workflow and causes inconveniences to employees. As new hires are getting trained, there are often gaps in coverage and other reps can be spread too thin. With employees coming and going, it can add to the irregularity of scheduling, providing a new challenge for managers trying to keep track of who should go where and when they should be assigned shifts.

“The Goldilocks effect”

Balancing the number of active employees can be tricky. Scheduling takes up to 2.64 hours a week for managers, Time Forge found. While managers don’t want to be overwhelmed with work, they also don’t want too many reps oversaturating the field. An excess number of 0reps can impose additional costs to the company if employees don’t have enough work to make their time worthwhile. In order to strike the perfect balance, managers must take time to experiment with what scheduling practice works best for their company.

You aren’t alone in your frustration scheduling your field team. Fortunately, there are ways to alleviate the burdens of scheduling:

Adopt employee scheduling software

Scheduling software will simplify and organize team scheduling. Look for solutions that allow you to add and edit client visits, schedule appointments, and report on visit data. Using software will cut down on time from manual scheduling and implement a straightforward system that the entire team can openin any place, at any time. In that regard, scheduling software can make your life easier and your schedule more efficient.

Make schedules flexible and accessible

Give employees access to their schedules through computers and mobile devices. Open options for them to have a say in their scheduling and make a system that facilitates swapping shifts if necessary.

Meanwhile, evaluate the stability of your employees’ availability and consider creating a stable schedule and a backup schedule. Seventeen percent of the workforce has unstable work shifts, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Create alternative schedules that accommodate changes in normal availability, especially during the holidays. Always have enough employees on hand to compensate for emergencies, delays and vacations.

Open communication

Implement a system where reps and managers can talk easily and quickly. Consider using a company-wide calendar so that employees can build a schedule together. Then, if problems arise, employees should reach out to their team and managers to work out a solution. Effective conversation both from managers to reps, and reps to reps is a critical component of scheduling because it helps improve and optimize current schedules, and also shows how it can be further developed.  

Employees can feel overwhelmed by the amount of activities they need to do as their post-sale and pre-sale activities increase. To help relieve employees of their stress and workload, create an optimized schedule and show them how to manage their time.This will establish an efficient and productive field team that gets its work done in a timely manner.