The fundamentals of shift scheduling — what every small-team manager learns the hard way
The first time I ever made a shift schedule for a small team, I made every classic mistake in about three days. I scheduled someone for a shift that started thirty minutes after their previous one ended, in the same week. I forgot that the law in our jurisdiction required at least 11 hours of rest between shifts. I assumed that if someone clocked in at 11 p.m. and clocked out at 7 a.m., that was eight hours — which it is, but the payroll system disagreed because the shift “spanned two days” in the wrong way. I learned what “split shift premium” meant the day someone politely asked why their pay envelope was light. I had a schedule that looked clean on paper and produced two grievances in week two.
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Time tracking for cafes and restaurants — what actually works on a busy Saturday
A friend of mine runs a coffee shop in Lisbon. Twelve staff, three managers on rotation, a constantly-shifting student crew. Last summer he sent me a long voice note around 2 a.m. on a Sunday. The gist of it: their cafe’s WiFi had crapped out at 11 a.m. on Saturday, taking down the time-tracking app that runs on the iPad by the till. Nobody could clock in for four hours. Nobody knew whether to wait it out or scribble names on a napkin. By the end of service the shift log had gaps in seven different places, and reconstructing payroll for that day cost him most of his Sunday.
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