How to build a restaurant roster that survives Friday night

Most restaurant rosters are last week's roster with two names swapped. It works fine until it doesn't: a 90-cover booking nobody wrote down, a kitchen hand who told you three weeks ago they had an exam, and a Friday where the bar is three deep and the floor has one person too few.

Good rostering is not complicated, but it does need to happen in the right order. This is the order we'd suggest, whether you run a 40-seat cafe or a pub with a bistro, a bar and a function room.

1. Start with the trade you expect

Before you open the roster, look at three things: the same week last year, the last four weeks, and the bookings already in the diary. Then add what you know that the numbers don't. School holidays. A home game. Rain on Saturday, which empties a courtyard and fills a dining room.

You don't need a forecasting model. You need a rough number of covers or a rough sales figure for each service, written down, so that the roster is an answer to a question. "Thursday dinner, about 70 covers" tells you far more than "Thursday dinner, the usual".

2. Roster stations, then people

This is the single change that fixes the most rosters. Decide what the service needs first:

• Kitchen: grill, pans, larder, pass, dish.
• Floor: sections, host, runner.
• Bar: service bar, front bar, glassie on busy nights.

Only then put names in the boxes. If you start with names, you end up rostering your favourites and finding the gaps on the night. If you start with stations, the gaps are visible on Tuesday when you can still do something about them.

It also makes it obvious where you are one resignation away from trouble. If only one person can run the pass on a Saturday, that is a training problem, and you'd rather find it on paper.

3. Stagger the starts

A roster where everyone starts at 5pm and finishes at close is easy to write and expensive to run. Trade builds and falls away, and your labour should follow it.

Bring one person in early for set-up, the bulk of the team half an hour before the first booking, and a late starter who covers the peak and helps close. On the way down, send people home in the same order the room empties. Half an hour trimmed from four shifts, five nights a week, is ten hours you were paying for an empty dining room.

4. Know the award rules that bite

This is the part that gets venues in trouble, usually by accident. The clauses below are from the Restaurant Industry Award 2020 as it stood when we wrote this. If your venue is covered by the Hospitality Industry (General) Award or the Fast Food Award, the numbers differ, so check your own award.

• Roster changes. For full-time and part-time staff, the roster has to be posted somewhere they can easily see it. It can be changed by mutual agreement, or by giving seven days' notice. "I texted you last night" is not seven days.
• Break between shifts. Permanent staff need at least 10 hours between finishing ordinary hours one day and starting the next, or 8 hours on a roster changeover. The classic breach is the close followed by the open.
• Meal breaks. Work five hours or more and there is an unpaid meal break of at least 30 minutes, with rules about when in the shift it falls. Longer shifts add paid rest breaks.
• Minimum engagement. A casual must be paid for at least two hours each time they come in, even if you send them home after 45 quiet minutes.
• Days off and split shifts. There is a minimum of eight full days off in a four-week period, and a split shift can't spread over more than 12 hours.

None of this is exotic. It just needs to be in your head, or in your system, at the moment you drag a shift from one day to another.

The close-then-open is the one that catches almost everyone. Check it every week.

5. Publish early and own the swaps

Staff who get their roster on Sunday night for a Monday start will take the other job when it comes up. Publishing a week or more ahead is a legal requirement for changes to permanent rosters, and it is also basic respect for people who have study, kids and second jobs.

Swaps are fine. Untracked swaps are not. Pick one rule and stick to it: a swap isn't real until a manager has approved it. Otherwise you find out at 5:15pm that Tom thought Priya was covering, and Priya thought she'd said maybe.

6. Close the loop every week

The roster is a plan. The timesheet is what happened. The gap between them is where your money goes.

Once a week, put rostered hours next to actual hours, by department. Ten minutes is enough. You're looking for patterns: the kitchen that always runs 40 minutes over on Sundays, the Wednesday lunch that never needs the third person. Fix one pattern a week and the roster gets better without anyone having a big meeting about it.

If you want the numbers side of this, we've written a separate guide on working out your labour cost percentage.

Where software earns its keep

You can do all of the above on a whiteboard, and plenty of good venues do. Software starts to earn its place once you have more than one department, more than one venue, or more than about fifteen people.

In Shiftzen, rosters are planned by venue, department and day, so the floor, bar and kitchen are each staffed the way you actually run them. Staff clock on at the SignBook kiosk, so the actual hours land next to the rostered ones without anyone typing up a timesheet. Managers see only their own venue.

It won't write a good roster for you. Nothing will. But it makes the weekly check a two-minute job instead of the thing you never get to.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Award conditions change. Check the current award for your business or speak to your accountant or the Fair Work Ombudsman.