How to build a staff rota in one afternoon
Published
Set up your first rota in one sitting.
A staff rota is the plan that says who works when. A good one covers every busy hour, shares the hard shifts fairly and reaches the team early enough for them to plan their lives. This guide shows how to build one in an afternoon, with paper, a spreadsheet or an app.
The order matters. Most rotas go wrong because the manager starts with names and fits the hours around them. Start with the hours instead.
Build the staff rota in five steps #
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Map the busy hours
Write out each day in one-hour blocks. Mark how many people each block needs, using last month's tills, bookings or footfall as your guide.
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Turn the blocks into shifts
Group the blocks into shifts that make sense to work. A shift that starts before opening covers setup. One that ends after closing covers cleaning.
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Collect availability first
Ask each person when they cannot work before you place anyone. People who are asked first complain less later.
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Place the hard shifts, then the rest
Fill weekends, early starts and late finishes first, and share them out. The easy shifts fill themselves.
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Check breaks and rest
Read each person's week from top to bottom. Look for missing breaks, short gaps between a late and an early, and anyone over their hours.
What to check before you share it #
Check three things before you send the staff rota. Every busy hour has enough people. No one works a shift they said they could not do. Every shift has someone who can open or close.
Breaks deserve their own pass. Our guide to planning rest breaks into each shift shows how to place them before the week starts, not on the day.
When the spreadsheet stops working #
A spreadsheet is fine for a staff rota of four people. Past that, people start to keep their own copies, and the copies drift. We compare the two ways in spreadsheet rota or scheduling app, with the signs that it is time to move.
If your team already sends you its days off by text, Fernhour can collect them for you. See how staff set their own availability.
For the bigger picture of how shift patterns affect people's sleep and health, the overview of shift work on Wikipedia is a fair starting point with its own sources.
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About the author
Head of product at Fernhour
Experience Ran a neighbourhood cafe and planned its rota by hand for six years
Isla planned shifts on paper, then in a spreadsheet, before she helped build Fernhour. She leads the product team and writes the guides on rotas, cover and fair shifts, using what she learned behind a counter.
