Writing

Notes from
the back office

Working-time rules, holiday accrual, training compliance and labour cost. Written for the person who actually builds the rota on a Tuesday afternoon, not for a procurement committee.

Compliance 9 min read

The rota is where compliance actually fails

Every operator we speak to has a training matrix. Almost none of them have one that is connected to the rota. So the spreadsheet says Priya is allergen-trained, the certificate expired in March, and on Saturday night she is on the pass. Nobody decided that — it simply happened, because the two systems never spoke.

What a connected system does instead, why "warn the manager" is not enough, and the one design decision that makes the difference: checking clearance against the date of the shift rather than against today.

Read the piece
Working time

The 11-hour rule nobody checks until payroll

Rest between shifts is the working-time rule that breaks most often and gets noticed least, because a close-then-open looks perfectly reasonable on a week grid. Why it hides, and how to surface it while the rota is still a draft.

6 min
Holiday

Holiday accrual for hourly staff, without the spreadsheet

5.6 weeks sounds simple until half your team is on variable hours. A plain-English walk through pro-rating statutory entitlement to contracted hours, what a "day" of leave costs someone on 22 hours a week, and where leave years trip people up.

8 min
Labour cost

Your labour percentage is a lagging indicator

Finding out on Monday that last week ran at 34% is history, not management. Forecasting covers and revenue per day, setting a target that means something, and reading the number while you can still move a shift.

7 min
Operations

Open shifts beat group chats

Most last-minute cover is arranged in a WhatsApp group nobody can audit. What changes when an uncovered shift is a thing in the system that eligible staff can claim — and why eligibility is the word doing the work in that sentence.

5 min
Multi-site

One person, two sites, forty-nine hours

Cross-site over-scheduling is invisible when each manager only sees their own rota. How a shared staff pool should work, and what a second site does to your weekly hours maths.

6 min