Rotas, holiday and the weeks everybody forgets

Two things reliably go wrong with staff time in a small service business. The rota is built around who is available rather than around when customers want to come, and holiday is handled informally until the week it becomes an argument.

Both are fixable and neither requires an HR department.

The number people underestimate

Statutory holiday in the UK is 5.6 weeks a year for a worker. For somebody working five days a week that is 28 days including bank holidays, and the statutory entitlement is capped at 28 days.

That is where the surprise sits. A business that closes on eight bank holidays and offers "20 days plus bank holidays" has offered exactly the statutory minimum, not a benefit on top of it. Plenty of owners believe they are being generous when they are meeting the floor.

Part time workers get it pro rata. Irregular hours and part year workers are calculated differently and the rules there have changed in recent years, so it is worth checking the current guidance on gov.uk rather than copying what a friend does. This is a summary, not employment advice, and getting a contract checked once is cheap.

Why the rota is usually wrong

Most small business rotas are built from staff preference and habit. The result is a shop with three people on a dead Tuesday and two on a Saturday with a waiting list.

Take your bookings from the last three months and plot them by hour and by day. Nearly every service business finds two things. There is a peak they are underserving and there are hours they are paying for that produce almost nothing.

Moving one shift from a quiet morning to a busy evening costs nothing and is usually worth more than any marketing you could run that month.

A leave process that takes five minutes

• Requests in writing, in one place, never verbally in the middle of a shift.
• A cut off for the busy period. Christmas requests in by the end of September, summer by the end of March. First come, first served after that, and everybody knows the rule in advance.
• A cap on how many people can be off at once, set per role rather than per person. Two stylists off is manageable. Both MOT testers off is a closed bay.
• Approved leave blocks the diary automatically. A holiday that exists in a WhatsApp thread but not in the booking system will be booked over, and it will be booked over by you.
• Visible balances. Most disputes about holiday are actually disputes about arithmetic, and they disappear the moment everybody can see the same number.

The things that get missed

Carry over rules should be written down. Whether unused days roll into the next year, and how many, is a decision you make once rather than an argument you have every January.

Holiday pay for staff whose earnings vary, including commission and tips where they count, is not simply their basic rate. This is a well known trap in commission based trades and it is worth getting right rather than discovering later.

Leavers are owed pay for holiday accrued and untaken. Budget for it rather than being surprised.

And self employed chair renters are not employees and do not accrue holiday from you at all, but the label on the arrangement does not decide the status. What actually happens in practice does, and getting that wrong is expensive.

Closing the business, as opposed to one person being off

Bank holidays and the Christmas shutdown are a different problem from staff leave, and most small businesses handle them at the last minute every single year.

Decide the closed days for the whole year in January and put them in the diary then. Not because January you is wiser, but because a closure added in December is a closure that somebody has already been booked into.

• Block the dates in the booking system before you tell anyone. A closure announced but not blocked will take an online booking within the day.
• Say it where people book, not only on social media. A note on the booking page reaches everybody trying to book. A post reaches whoever the algorithm felt like reaching that afternoon.
• Warn the regulars whose slot falls in the gap, individually, and move them before you close rather than after you reopen. The fortnightly customer whose Thursday lands on Boxing Day will otherwise turn up.
• Decide what happens to the week either side. The days before a Christmas closure are usually the busiest of the year and the days after are usually dead, so a rota built on the normal pattern gets both wrong.
• Write down whether the closed days come out of anybody's entitlement. If you close for three days between Christmas and New Year and staff are required to take them as leave, that has to be in the contract and said well in advance, not announced in December.

Bank holidays are the same decision in miniature. There is no automatic right to time off on a bank holiday and no automatic right to extra pay for working one. Whatever you do is whatever the contract says, so the contract needs to say something.

The version that works

One place where availability, approved leave, closures and bookings all live, so a booked holiday closes the diary and a shift pattern reflects when customers actually turn up.

Everything else is negotiation, and negotiation is far easier when nobody is arguing about the facts.