Creating a staff schedule, step by step

Creating a staff schedule means distributing a period’s staffing needs across the team so that every hour is covered by enough people with the right qualifications, while contracts, wishes and labour law are respected. The following seven steps apply to a shop just as much as to a doctor’s practice or a bank branch.

Before you start

You need five things in one place:

• opening or surgery hours, including preparation and closing,
• staffing needs per area and qualification,
• contracts with weekly hours and agreed working days,
• leave, sick leave, vocational school days and wishes,
• the collective agreement and any works agreement.

Step 1: Determine demand per hour and area

Decide how many people with which qualification are needed at what time. Distinguish minimum staffing, which must never be undercut, from desired staffing for peak times. Example store: at least one person at the checkout from 7 am to 7 pm, two from 4 pm; one person at the deli counter from 8 am to 6 pm.

Step 2: Define shifts

Demand turns into shifts: early, middle and late shifts with fixed breaks. More than 6 hours of working time requires a break of at least 30 minutes (§ 11 AZG), for young workers from 4.5 hours (§ 15 KJBG). Keep these shifts as a template so you don’t have to reinvent them every week.

Step 3: Collect availability and absences

Record what is fixed for each person: leave, sick leave, vocational school days, agreed days off and day patterns such as “mornings only”. Then add wishes: preferred days and days on which someone would rather not work. The earlier this information is in, the fewer changes are needed later.

Step 4: Assign shifts

Assign the hard-to-fill shifts first: those requiring a rare qualification, long Saturdays and early or late hours. Then the rest. Keep three things in view at once:

• Qualification: whoever takes the shift must be allowed to do the work.
• Hours: weekly hours should match the contract; deviations go to the time account.
• Fairness: share Saturdays, late shifts and unpopular days evenly and meet wishes where possible.

Step 5: Check against labour law

Check every person and every week. The most important points:

The details are in the guides on working hours and rest periods, apprentices and young workers and maternity protection. In retail, the Saturday rules of the retail collective agreement apply on top.

Step 6: Announce in time

If the employer sets working hours without an agreement, they must be communicated at least two weeks in advance for each week (§ 19c AZG). Announce the schedule in a way that reaches everyone and lets you prove the date: on a notice board, by e-mail or in an app. More in Changing the schedule.

Step 7: Handle changes

Sick leave, swap requests and short-notice absences are part of everyday life. Record who agreed to which change, recheck rest periods and maximum limits after every change and inform everyone affected. For the records under § 26 AZG, what was actually worked is what counts.

Five typical mistakes

1. Late shift, then early shift: ending at 9 pm and starting at 6:30 am leaves only 9.5 hours of rest.
2. Apprentice until closing time: under 18, work ends at 8 pm.
3. Unnoticed additional hours: part-timers slip over their hours week after week without anyone tracking it.
4. Saturday after the long Saturday: in retail, after working on a Saturday after 1 pm, the following Saturday must stay entirely free unless another model has been agreed; exceptions apply, for example, to the four Saturdays before Christmas.
5. Schedule too late: a schedule that only arrives on Friday for the next week and has not been agreed falls short of the two-week notice.

Spreadsheet or software?

A spreadsheet is enough while the team is small and the shifts stay the same. The more part-timers, apprentices and locations come in, the more time steps 4 and 5 take, and the easier it is for a violation to slip through. What to look for in software is covered in the guide Staff scheduling in Austria.

In eutempus: You set up steps 1 and 2 once as a template; you and your team keep step 3 up to date, including leave requests in the app. The optimiser takes over step 4 and checks part of step 5 along the way: qualifications, absences, the 12-hour limit, the limits for young workers and pregnant employees and the Saturday rotation as hard rules, the 11-hour rest period as a soft rule. What it does not check is listed in the guide. One click publishes the schedule in the app; optionally it also goes as a PDF by e-mail to chosen recipients.

Sources

1. Working Time Act (Arbeitszeitgesetz, AZG), RIS, current version (German)
2. § 25 AZG: posting requirement, RIS (German)
3. § 19c AZG: timing of normal working hours, RIS (German)
4. Employment of Children and Young Persons Act (KJBG), RIS, current version (German)
5. Maternity Protection Act (MSchG), RIS, current version (German)