Guide: How to make a rota

This is a complete guide on how to create a rota. Here’s what you can learn:

The guide covers everything you need to know about the concepts you need to understand to create a rota. It explains methods you might find useful and is packed with tips on how to structure your rota to make scheduling your employees as easy as possible.

The guide is illustrated using Smartplan’s shift planning system, but the same factors apply if you end up creating it in Excel (see later why you shouldn’t) or another online system.

You don’t need to read the guide from start to finish. Use the sidebar table of contents to jump to the section you want to learn more about.

Rotas are used in many different industries.

Each industry may have its own methods or approaches, but often the same challenges are at play.

In this chapter, you can explore some of the industries that use rotas, and we’ll address the key aspects to consider.

Rotas are used in many different industries. The industries we assist include:

• Restaurants
  
• Cafés
• Webshops
• Warehouses
• Customer service
• Callcenters
• Campsites
• Hotels
• Inns
• Tourist attractions
• Guide companies
• Taxi operators
• Medical practices
• Private hospitals
• Libraries
• Superliga clubs
• Sports associations
• And so on.

The list is long, highlighting how varied the needs can be when creating a rota. What’s crucial for you is finding an approach that suits your business and your way of doing things.

When it comes to planning, you need to consider:

• Whether you want to create available shifts for employees to pick up themselves?
  
• Whether you want to create and staff the rota yourself?
• Whether you want to use more automated planning?
• How many hours your employees should have per week or month?
• Which location should they report to?
• Which shifts can an employee cover?
• Is your staffing requirement the same from week to week, or does it vary?

Once the rota is made, you need to consider:

• Can my employees swap shifts without approval?
  
• Do they have to clock in and out when they arrive at work?
• Does an admin have to approve the attendance?

There are many factors to consider. In this guide, we’ll help you answer as many of these questions as possible, but we’ll primarily focus on the first part: creating the rota.

There are two key aspects of a rota, which are the most important elements:

• That it is always up to date
  
• That it is visible for your employees

In this chapter, we’ll explore why this is important and, most importantly, how you can achieve it.

If your rota isn’t updated to always reflect the reality of your business, it becomes unreliable, and you lose both the overview and confidence that your business is running optimally.

Equally important is that the rota is visible to your employees. After all, how can you trust that your staff will show up when they’re supposed to if they can’t see the rota?

By fulfilling these two points, you achieve a well-functioning rota that keeps up with reality instead of being “correct” only at the moment you create it.

For this reason, you should create your rota online. This makes things easier for both you and your employees while also providing all the benefits of an online rota.

It’s easier for you to keep it updated since you only need to do it in one place.

If your rota is in Excel or on paper, any correction needs to be made in all the places where the rota has been printed and posted.

Or it has to be emailed to employees with the subject: “IMPORTANT: The rota has been updated.” If you use an online tool, you only need to make the correction once, and the changes are instantly available to your employees.

If you create a new shift, delete a shift, or make changes to a shift, your employees will know immediately.

In Smartplan, they receive a notification about any changes that affect them, so they know how their work has been changed.

Visibility is, of course, closely tied to keeping the rota updated. By accessing the rota from a smartphone, both you and your employees can always check the schedule to see who they’re working with and when they’re scheduled to work.

This minimizes the risk of errors, creating a more stable workplace where employees arrive on time.

Let’s take a look at how to create the online rota:

The first thing to consider when starting your rota is the length of the period you want to plan for.

In some industries, there are even collective agreement rules that specify how long a rota must be at a minimum, so employees know how many shifts they’re getting.

I won’t dive deeper into these rules in this guide but will instead explain how you can approach the duration of your rota.

I recommend planning for 1, 2, or 3 months at a time. While you can plan further ahead, creating a rota for 6 months or more brings you closer to guessing than actual planning.

Who knows what day-to-day operations will look like in 6 months?

Instead, try this approach:

Plan your rota for 1 or 2 months. Release the rota to your employees so they can see their shifts and start swapping if needed. Meanwhile, you can begin preparing for the upcoming period. For instance, if you’re collecting shift requests, you can set up the expected staffing needs early but hold off on releasing the final rota.

When you release your rota, it typically starts to evolve. The rota meets reality. And reality rarely fully aligns with the plan.

If your rota spans too long a period, you may find yourself suddenly dealing with employees requesting to drop their shifts because they can no longer work.

The opposite extreme isn’t ideal either. A rota covering just one week can undermine the purpose of having a rota: avoiding chaos and maintaining structure and predictability in your staffing.

If you only plan one week at a time, it might feel like all you ever do is create rotas. That’s not how it should be.

Once you’ve settled on the duration of your rota, you need to choose the type of scheduling you’ll use. You might already have a preferred method, but I’ll outline the benefits of the different approaches anyway.

Before you can start thinking about who to schedule, you first need an overview of your staffing requirements. Your staffing needs consist of the following elements:

• Time spans
  
• Required skills
• The number of employees needed in each time span

Once you’ve decided on the duration of your rota, the next step is determining the time spans when you need employees to work. Divide your day into periods based on your staffing needs for different times and roles. In Smartplan, all shifts have a positions. This position describes the shift and the skills required to take it.

Positions can be used in various ways, for example:

• Waiter
  
• Bartender
• Librarian

But they can also specify the role more clearly:

• Instead of "Waiter," it could be "Host."
  
• Instead of "Bartender," it could be "Bar - Reception."
• Instead of "Librarian," it could be "Lending Desk."

There are many ways to use roles to communicate to employees what a shift entails.

You can also use positions to divide your rota across different locations. For example, if you have five stores and some employees can work in multiple locations while others can only work in one, positions can help:

• "Cashier - Vesterbro"
  
• "Cashier - Aarhus"
• "Cashier - Aalborg"
• "Cashier - Odense"
• "Cashier - Roskilde"”

The advantage here is that employees can be assigned specific positions. For instance, Jens might be linked to "Cashier - Aarhus" and "Cashier - Aalborg." This means he can only pick up available shifts or swap shifts of those types. As a planner, you’ll also be warned if you assign him a shift he isn’t "qualified" for.

Here’s an example of the time spans in our customer service rota:

9-13 and 13-17, Monday to Friday.

From 9-13, we need one support agent for Danish support and one for German support. From 13-17, we need one support agent for Danish support. So, we’ve divided the day into two shifts:

Our positions are simply "Support" and "German Support" so the employees know what to do when they arrive.

Now that you’ve defined your staffing requirements, it’s time to staff your rota. You can approach this in three different ways:

Here I will outline the following three ways to create your rota:

• Define staffing needs and publish available shifts
  
• Define staffing needs and assign shifts
• Automatic staffing based on requests and rules

Define staffing needs and release available shifts

This approach can be used if you want to implement a "first come, first served" principle—a method suitable if you don’t need full control over who works when.

It works by defining the types of shifts you need, how many employees are required, and when they are needed. You then publish the rota, and your employees start claiming shifts.

The advantage of this method is that it shifts the planning responsibility to your employees. Some industries use this method more than others. For example, it’s a popular method among volunteer organizations.

If you have many volunteers who can only take a few shifts, you can let them pick the shifts they are available for. This can be more efficient than assigning shifts that volunteers may not want to take.

This method is also useful in industries where shifts are highly sought after. To avoid having to decide which employees get the shifts, you can simply leave it up to "first come, first served." This way, no one feels unfairly treated, and you avoid the friction that can arise from giving shifts to some employees but not others.

This can apply, for example, to venues or booths at concerts or football matches.

Define staffing needs and assign shifts

With this approach, you are in charge of building the team. You define the staffing needs and then assign the shifts to the employees you want to cover them (this is what we call a puzzle, and we aim to make it easier for you).

When assigning shifts, there are many factors to keep track of in your mind. By using an online shift planning tool, you can offload some of the elements you’d otherwise have to manage yourself:

• Absences, availability, and time-off requests
  
• Skills required for different shift types
• In Smartplan, you can even set rules such as weekly hours, maximum weekend shifts, and more. (More on this in the next section.)

By creating your rota online, you make it easier for yourself, as the tool takes care of some of the repetitive tasks involved in assigning shifts.

Once you’ve finalized your staffing, you release the rota so it becomes visible to your employees. This part works similarly to using an Excel sheet. All planning remains hidden until you decide to send the shifts to your employees.

The difference between Excel and online shift planning, in this context, is that as soon as you click the "publish" button, your employees receive a notification on their mobile devices and can immediately see their shifts.

Another difference is that, instead of handling shift swaps manually in Excel and making corrections yourself, an online planning tool can take care of this for you.

Automatic staffing of shifts

You can also choose to have your rota created for you. When I create a rota, I use this method. It’s the one that saves me the most time and provides the best initial rota.

I include this method even though few shift planning systems support it. Here, I’m obviously biased since Smartplan offers this feature.

With automatic rota planning, you first define your staffing needs and the rules you want to be followed. You can then open the rota for employee requests. After that, Smartplan can handle the staffing for you.

This means that Smartplan can invite your employees to submit their availability and indicate when they don’t want to work. Once you’ve defined how many employees and which types of shifts you need, as well as the time spans, employees can mark when they are unavailable.

You can set the following rules either generally or for individual employees:

• Maximum hours per week
  
• Minimum hours per week
• Maximum consecutive working days
• Maximum hours per day
• Maximum consecutive weekends worked
• Minimum hours of rest between shifts
• Specific days or times they must not work

Using this method eliminates the need to remember all the rules listed above while assigning shifts. Instead, you enter these rules in Smartplan, which then generates a proposed rota for you.

The beauty of this is that you can override the automatic planning if needed. For example, if there are specific shifts you want to staff first, you can do that, and the automatic planning will account for your changes when generating suggestions.

This is useful, for example, if you have full-time employees who always work at fixed times and part-time or hourly employees who work at varying times.

Once you’ve received a proposed rota, you can make adjustments or tweak your rules and request a new proposal. This saves you from doing all the heavy lifting.

Receive requests and create a rota closer to reality
‍Now we come to your most important task when creating a rota: The key is to find staffing as close to real-world needs as possible. By this, I mean that once your rota is released, it should require minimal adjustments.

Anyone can create a rota without considering real-world conditions, but as soon as it’s released and meets reality, it will need changes. If your rota isn’t close to the reality it must function in, you’ll spend too much energy adapting it once it’s released.

By allowing your employees to submit requests for your staffing needs, you increase the likelihood that they’ll actually be able to work the shifts they’re assigned. This means fewer shifts will be swapped, your employees will be more satisfied, and the rota—and workplace—will be more stable.

You can never entirely avoid shift swaps once your rota is published. This is natural when the planned schedule meets reality, and the rota starts to "live." By using an online system, you make it easier to keep your rota up to date and aligned with reality—a further reason not to use Excel.

You can use a template to:

• Create rotations for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or more weeks.
  
• Save time by reusing staffing needs for the next rota.
• Have different templates for different seasons.

Below, I’ll show you how.

We’ve now looked at three different ways to assign shifts, and you should have enough knowledge to get started with your own rota planning. However, when discussing rota planning, we can’t ignore the topic of templates.

When faced with creating a rota, it’s natural to look for shortcuts. If you were planning to do it in Excel, you’d likely Google a rota template to get the structure provided in an Excel file, so you’d only need to focus on planning and not on setting up the structure.

With an online rota planning system, the structure is already provided, and templates become an even more powerful tool.

In online rota planning systems, you can create templates to avoid repeating yourself. If you’ve identified a staffing pattern that works for your business, you can save it as a template and eliminate the need to recreate it every time.

Templates also make it easier to create rotations for 1, 2, 3, 4, or more weeks. If you have a fixed pattern that repeats every, say, 6 weeks, you can set up those 6 weeks as a template that repeats itself.

This means you can create a rotation that cycles for the period you’re planning your rota.

Sometimes it’s necessary to plan shifts for multiple locations.

These could be different business areas or physical locations.

We’ll cover this in this chapter.

When creating your rota, you also need to decide how to structure it. For many, it’s sufficient to have a single rota at a time—one for the current period and a future rota to replace it.

However, others may need to divide their rotas by location.

A location can mean many things. It could be physical places, such as two different stores. But it could also be two different business areas at the same physical location.

Imagine an e-commerce business with a warehouse and customer service located in the same building. In this case, you would typically have two different rotas running simultaneously: one for the warehouse and one for customer service.

You would often create such a division if you require staffing for different physical locations or if the work areas—and therefore the staffing needs—are different.

Sometimes, combining different areas into a single rota can make it more difficult to manage, especially if the staffing needs are very different or the employees don’t overlap in their responsibilities.

On the other hand, if there’s a need for visibility across areas, it might make more sense to combine them into a single rota. This can also simplify rota planning in some cases.

In such situations, it can be useful to use positions to differentiate between locations. This way, all shifts and staffing needs are in one rota, with the location included as part of the position.