How to publish the shift schedule to your team

In many restaurants the official schedule is a sheet taped up in the kitchen, and the copy that really matters is the photo someone took of it on their phone. Then come the familiar problems: the photo wasn't the final version, Thursday's change never reached the group chat, and "I thought I started at 12" becomes a weekly conversation.

How far in advance must it be published?

Chilean law sets no number of days for publishing the schedule. What it does require is certainty:

• The contract must state the length and distribution of the working day, unless the company works with a shift system, in which case it refers to the internal rules (article 10).
• In companies with ten or more workers, the internal rules must state when work starts and ends and the hours of each shift (article 154).

The Labour Directorate has interpreted what that certainty means:

…el sistema de turnos incorporado en el reglamento interno debe contener elementos que permitan a las partes conocer con anticipación suficiente el horario en que el trabajador cumplirá sus labores…

A shift system must let both sides know the worker's hours with enough notice. In that case, the Labour Directorate objected to a system with many possible shifts and a schedule published on Friday or Saturday for a Monday start. The practical conclusion: a few defined shifts, a clear way of assigning them, and the week published in advance.

The deadlines that are in the law

Three situations have a fixed notice period:

Outside those arrangements, changing someone's agreed hours without their consent is not something the employer is free to do.

Publishing is committing

A published schedule is a commitment: people organise their lives around it. Three practices prevent most conflicts:

1. Publish weekly, in advance, and don't change it silently.
2. If something changes, tell whoever it affects, not the whole group, and keep a record of the change.
3. Let each person see their own shifts, not a twenty-row grid they have to search.

If the restaurant uses an electronic attendance system, the Labour Directorate resolution that governs them requires the system to record shift changes, with the date the new shift was assigned and who asked for the change. One more reason for changes to be in writing.

How Batuta handles it

In Batuta, publishing a week does three things: it locks it, so what was published isn't rewritten without a record; it emails each person their own shifts; and it attaches a file the phone's calendar understands, so the shifts land in it. If something changes later, only the people affected get an email, with what changed, and the calendar is corrected rather than duplicated.