Employee Scheduling

Every shift-based business faces the same problem: building schedules that balance coverage, cost, compliance, and fairness — then doing it again the following week.

Spreadsheets, group chats, and paper rotas don't scale. Managers spend hours building schedules. Staff don't know when they're working until the last minute. Labour costs spiral without visibility. Shift swaps happen over text messages with no record. And when someone calls in sick, the scramble begins.

This isn't just a hospitality problem. Retail, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, security, and any operation that runs on shifts faces the same challenges. The details differ — a restaurant needs front-of-house and back-of-house coverage, a warehouse needs pickers and packers, a care home needs qualified nurses on every shift — but the underlying problem is identical: get the right people in the right place at the right time, within budget, and within the law.

The business case for better scheduling is clear:

Labour is typically the largest controllable cost. Without visibility while scheduling, it's easy to overspend.
Staff turnover increases when schedules are unpredictable or unfair. Replacing an employee costs far more than retaining one.
Compliance failures around working hours, rest breaks, and leave entitlements create legal risk and financial penalties.
Understaffing damages service quality and overworks the team. Overstaffing damages margins.

A complete employee scheduling program has two parts:

Using Pilla as Your Employee Handbook

A handbook your team will actually use

Shift Scheduling

Rotas that work for everyone

Each part supports the other. Clear policies set expectations. Good scheduling puts those policies into practice.

Part 1: Your employee handbook

Before you build a single schedule, your team needs to know the rules. What are the working hours? How do they request time off? What happens if they're late? How does the disciplinary process work? What's the dress code? What are their leave entitlements?

Most businesses have these policies written down somewhere — in a handbook nobody reads, a contract addendum nobody remembers, or a folder in the manager's office nobody opens. The information exists, but it never reaches the people who need it. Without policies your team actually understands, every manager makes their own decisions. One approves a shift swap; another declines the same request. The result is inconsistency, resentment, and — eventually — grievances or tribunals.

Your employee handbook covers two categories: workplace policies (attendance, discipline, grievance, dress code, probation, flexible working) and leave entitlements (annual leave, sick leave, maternity and paternity, bereavement, public holidays, casual worker leave, part-time worker leave, and time off in lieu). Each policy needs to be specific to your organisation, not generic legal boilerplate — and it needs to reach your team in a format they'll actually engage with.

How Pilla helps

Pilla lets you build your employee handbook as a video library. Instead of written documents that gather dust, you record short videos explaining each policy in plain language — your manager, in your workplace, explaining your specific rules. Staff watch on their phone. New starters work through key policies during onboarding. When policies change, you record a new video, push it to the team, and track who has watched it. View tracking gives you evidence that communication actually happened — not just a signature on a sheet.

The Employee Handbook guide walks you through recording videos for each workplace policy and leave entitlement — what to cover, how to structure your recording, and the questions your team will ask.

Part 2: Scheduling that balances everyone's needs

The schedule itself is where planning meets reality. You need to match staffing levels to demand, respect availability and preferences, comply with working time regulations, stay within budget, and distribute shifts fairly — all while building the schedule quickly enough that you're not spending your entire week on it.

Good scheduling starts with understanding demand. What does your operation actually need? How many people, with what skills, at what times? Historical data helps, but you also need to account for events, seasons, promotions, and anything else that shifts your workload.

Templates and repeating patterns save enormous time. Most operations follow a broadly similar pattern week to week. Rather than building from scratch every time, start with a template and adjust for the specific week's needs — who's on leave, where demand differs, which shifts need swapping.

Compliance adds another layer. Every country has rules on maximum working hours, minimum rest periods, overtime, and protections for young workers and night workers. These rules vary significantly — what's legal in one jurisdiction may be a violation in another. If you operate across borders, or simply employ staff from different age groups, you need to schedule within the rules for each situation.

How Pilla helps

Pilla gives you drag-and-drop scheduling with templates, copy-from-last-week, and real-time cost visibility. Staff submit availability in the app, so you see who's available before you start building. The system flags potential working time issues before you publish, so you catch compliance problems at the scheduling stage rather than after the fact. Once published, staff see their schedule instantly on their phone. Leave requests, approvals, and balances are built in — approved leave automatically blocks shifts, preventing the common mistake of scheduling someone who's on holiday.

The Shift Scheduling guide covers demand planning, building efficiently, working hours compliance, fair scheduling, and handling changes.

The complete cycle

The two parts of employee scheduling — policies and scheduling — form a cycle that reinforces itself:

Your employee handbook communicates the rules around working hours, absence, conduct, leave entitlements, and more — through video that staff actually watch
Scheduling implements those rules week by week, matching people to demand within the constraints
Patterns feed back into better policies and smarter scheduling over time

When one part breaks down, the other suffers. Without clear policies, scheduling decisions feel arbitrary. Without good scheduling tools, even the best policies can't be implemented efficiently.

Why a single system matters

Many businesses cobble together separate tools — a spreadsheet for the rota, email for leave requests, a folder of Word documents for policies. The problem isn't any individual tool; it's that they don't talk to each other.

When leave management is disconnected from scheduling, managers accidentally schedule people who are off. When policies live in a different system from the schedule, compliance checks are manual and error-prone. When there's no single view of who's working, who's off, and what the rules are, mistakes multiply.

A single system that connects policies and scheduling means:

Less duplication — Enter information once, use it everywhere
Fewer mistakes — Leave blocks shifts automatically; compliance checks happen during scheduling
Better visibility — Managers see the full picture; staff see their schedule and leave balance in one place
Audit trail — Every decision is recorded with timestamps and context

Getting started

Where you start depends on what's causing the most pain:

If scheduling takes too long — Start with the Scheduling guide. Templates, copy-from-last-week, and drag-and-drop can cut your scheduling time dramatically.

If policies are inconsistent or missing — Start with the Employee Handbook guide. Video-based policies that your team actually watches are the foundation everything else builds on.

If you're starting from scratch — Work through both guides in order: employee handbook first, then scheduling. The handbook sets the rules; the schedule puts them into practice.