Guides
How to make a staff rota
A good staff rota is built in four passes: collect availability and demand, draft shifts against them, check the legal floor — rest, breaks, and weekly hours — and publish it where staff will actually see it. Most rota problems trace back to skipping one of the last two.
1. Start from availability and demand
Before placing a single shift, write down two lists: when each person can work (contracted hours, availability, booked holiday) and what the operation needs (opening hours, expected busy periods, minimum cover per role). A rota drafted without these is guesswork you’ll redo after the first complaint.
2. Draft the shifts
Work day by day against demand, placing your least flexible people first. This is mechanical work, so the tool should be fast: in Darouta you can use spreadsheet keyboard shortcuts to copy and fill patterns across the week — or, on the Pro plan, type shifts in plain English: “Alice 9-5 on Monday” — and a “Fill days off” action marks every remaining empty cell as off in one click.
3. Check the legal floor
In the UK, the Working Time Regulations set minimums that every rota has to respect. Per gov.uk’s rest-breaks guidance, workers are entitled to an uninterrupted 20-minute rest break when the working day exceeds 6 hours, 11 hours of rest between working days, and an uninterrupted 24 hours without work each week (or 48 hours each fortnight). Per gov.uk’s weekly-hours guidance, average working time is capped at 48 hours a week, normally averaged over 17 weeks, unless the worker has opted out.
The classic violation is the close-then-open: a late shift followed by an early one with less than 11 hours between them. Darouta’s Labour Law Guardrails flag insufficient daily rest, missing breaks, and weekly-hours risks while you schedule — before the rota goes out. These automated checks are operational guidance for the jurisdiction you select, not legal advice.
4. Publish where staff actually look
A rota that lives in a back-office file doesn’t exist as far as the team is concerned. Publish to a live link staff can open on any phone without an account, email it with a PDF attached, and when plans change, republish — Darouta emails only the people whose shifts changed, each seeing exactly which of their own shifts moved.
Common rota mistakes
- Scheduling from memory instead of collected availability — the top source of swaps and no-shows.
- Close-then-open pairs that break the 11-hour daily rest minimum.
- Publishing late, then changing silently — staff stop trusting the rota and start screenshotting it.
- No single source of truth — three versions of the week in three chat threads. A live link makes the current version the only version.
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