A kitchen has a problem the floor does not: people are not interchangeable. Out front, with a bit of training, anyone can cover a section. In a kitchen the person on sauce does not move to grill because somebody is missing that night, and a plan that assumes otherwise produces services that fall apart.

Almost everything else follows from this.

A kitchen shift is two shifts

The first mistake is treating the day as one block. A kitchen contains two different jobs with opposite requirements.

Prep is plannable, quiet work that can move by an hour with no consequences. It does not need the full brigade, it needs time and space.

Service is the opposite: it does not move, its start and end are dictated by guests, and it needs every section standing at once.

Putting the same people on the same hours for both is what generates the overtime bill: whoever comes in for prep reaches the end of service with ten hours behind them. It is the same distinction as split versus block shifts, covered in split shifts or block.

Sections are roles, not names

The practical rule that solves the most: do not write names in the plan, write sections. Every service shift needs a grill, a second on sauce, a pastry if you make desserts in house, a wash-up.

Expressed that way, two things become visible immediately:

  • the real gaps. Not "we are four", but "Thursday night nobody can stand on grill". The second sentence can be solved in advance, the first cannot;
  • the people who cover several sections. They are your actual margin, and they should be protected rather than spent. If the plan only works because one person can do everything, that plan has one week of runway.

Tomorrow's prep is paid for today

A constraint that almost never appears in a rota: Sunday's service is prepared on Saturday. If Saturday's prep gets skipped because the room was too busy, then on Sunday you are not missing a person, you are missing that person's work, and it is already too late.

It is worth putting prep in as an explicit block with its own time, exactly as you would with breaks. Whatever has no time in the plan does not happen: that holds for breaks and it holds for preparation.

Counting hours, which in kitchens is the real problem

Hospitality is the sector where contracted hours go out of control fastest, for a structural reason: a kitchen finishes when the work finishes, not when the shift finishes.

Three habits that keep the count honest:

  • log the real finish, not the planned one. If every night runs twenty minutes over and nobody writes it down, by month end you have two invisible days;
  • watch the rolling four-week total, not the single week. One heavy week is not a problem, four in a row is;
  • schedule the payback when you authorise the overrun, not after. The full reasoning is in overtime.

What turnover changes

Kitchen turnover is high, and every departure takes a covered section with it. Anyone keeping an up-to-date map of who can do what notices while there is still time to train someone; anyone without one notices on the evening the resignation arrives.

In Sked Solve any shift can require a specific role, so the plan never proposes someone who does not cover that section and the gaps show up before service. See how it works at Sked Solve.