Staff routines that survive the holiday cover, the bad Mondays, and the new starter
The first time our head of kitchen took a proper holiday, I thought we'd be fine. He'd been with us four years. The opening routine was, in my head, bulletproof. Two days in, the cover chef started prep at 7:30 instead of 7:00 because nobody had told him the soup needed to be on by service. Day three, the chiller was running warm and nobody had checked it because the person who always checked it was in Portugal. Day four, we ran out of focaccia by 11am.
Same kitchen. Same recipes. Same suppliers. Three days of near-miss prep gaps and one genuinely angry lunch rush. That was the week I realised our "routine" was not a routine at all. It was a set of habits that lived in one person's head, and the moment that head went on a Ryanair flight, the whole thing fell apart.
This guide is about building routines that actually survive. Holiday cover, bad Mondays, the new starter who learns by watching, the long-term staffer who has quietly started doing their own version. Here's how we eventually got it right.
Why this matters
If your routines live in people's heads, your business is one resignation away from chaos. That sounds dramatic until it happens to you. The EHO doesn't care that your usual closer is brilliant. They care that the fridge temperatures are recorded, the cleaning is logged, and that whoever is on shift tonight knows what to do. Under the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013, you need documented procedures you can show on demand. "Jenny always does it" is not a procedure.
There's a financial side too. Inconsistent opens cost you money in ways you don't see on the P&L. A chiller checked late means stock thrown out three days later. A coffee machine not flushed properly means you're tasting yesterday's milk in this morning's flat white, and the regular doesn't come back. A closing checklist skipped means the morning team starts at a deficit and is already behind by 9am.
And then there's the human cost. Staff hate uncertainty more than they hate hard work. If your team doesn't know what "good" looks like at the end of a shift, they will either over-deliver and burn out, or quietly under-deliver and resent you for not noticing. A clear routine is, in a small way, an act of kindness.
The three rules for routines that survive
We tried a lot of things at Welsh Back. Whiteboards. Group chats. Verbal handovers. Laminated A4 sheets that nobody read. After enough failures, three rules emerged that actually work.
Written. If it isn't on paper or on a screen, it doesn't exist. Verbal training is fine for the first week. After that, the new starter is filtering everything through whatever they last heard, and the long-term staffer is doing it their way. The act of writing it down forces you to be specific. "Clean the coffee machine" becomes "back-flush the group heads with Cafiza, soak the steam wand tip in hot water, wipe the drip tray".
Signed off by the people who do the work. This is the bit most operators skip. You do not write the routine and hand it down from the office. You sit with the closing team for half an hour and ask them what they actually do, in what order, and why. Then you write that up. Then they sign it. We did the top-down version twice at Welsh Back, both times the team quietly stopped doing the version we wrote and did their own. The third time we sat down with them first, and it stuck.
Visible where the work happens. Not in a binder in the office. Not in a shared drive nobody opens. On the wall above the sink. On the prep bench. On the back of the till. If the person doing the task has to walk more than three steps to find the instructions, they won't.
Opening routine: what actually needs to be on it
The opening is where the day is won or lost. A good open buys you back twenty minutes during the rush. A bad one means you're chasing your tail until 2pm. Here's what we ended up with at Harbourside, in roughly the order it happened:
- Lights, music, heating on. Front door still locked.
- Chiller and freezer temperatures logged. Anything outside 1-5°C for chillers gets escalated before anything else happens.
- Coffee machine on, group heads flushed, grinders dialled in with a test shot. Milk in the fridge by the bar.
- Pastry case stocked from the morning delivery. Anything left from yesterday goes on the discount shelf with a date label.
- Float counted into the till by two people, both initial the sheet.
- Kitchen prep list checked against the day's bookings and the weather. (Yes, weather. A sunny Saturday in Bristol means double the brunch covers.)
- Toilets checked, restocked, signed off.
- Front of house briefing at five to nine. Specials, allergens, anything broken.
The whole thing took about 45 minutes with two people. The list lived on the back of the swing door into the kitchen, laminated, with a wet-wipe pen for the date and initials. Simple, ugly, worked.
Closing routine: where most cafés bleed money
Closing is where exhausted people make expensive mistakes. The team has been on their feet for nine hours, they want to get home, and the temptation to skip the bits nobody will check is enormous. Your closing routine has to assume tired people, not motivated people.
We split ours into three zones, each with one named person responsible. Bar, kitchen, floor. Each zone had its own checklist, and each finished with a signature. The last person out did a final walk-through against a shorter "lock-up" list: gas off, ovens off, back door bolted, alarm set, keys in the safe.
The thing that changed closing for us was making the morning team's life the explicit goal. We stopped framing closing as "finishing the day" and started framing it as "setting up tomorrow". Cloths soaking, not just rinsed. Coffee hopper topped up so the opener didn't have to. Prep list updated based on what we ran out of. It's a small shift in language, but it changed how people closed up.
A routine designed without the team is theatre. They will smile, sign it, and then quietly do their own version.
Weekly deep clean and the monthly reset
Daily routines handle the day. But there's a whole category of stuff that doesn't need doing every shift, and if you don't schedule it, it never happens until the EHO is reaching for the canopy filter and you're suddenly very interested in when it was last degreased.
Our weekly deep clean ran on Sunday afternoons after close. Canopy filters, behind the fridges, descale of the coffee machine, oven deep clean, ice machine. One person owned it, one person checked it, both signed. It took about two hours and we built it into the rota so it wasn't extra work, it was the work for that shift.
The monthly reset was bigger. Stocktake, full chiller defrost, pest check, fire extinguisher visual check, first aid kit restock, allergen matrix review against the current menu. We did it on the first Tuesday of every month because Tuesdays were quiet. The point of the monthly reset wasn't just the cleaning. It was a forced moment to look at the place with fresh eyes and notice the things that had drifted.
Why staff buy-in is the whole game
I said earlier we wrote the routines top-down twice and they failed twice. Here's why. The team who actually does the closing knows things you don't. They know that the dishwasher needs to be turned off before the gas because of where the switches are. They know that prepping the lemons for tomorrow at the end of tonight is faster than doing it in the morning. They know which corner of the cellar floods when it rains.
If you write the routine without them, you will miss those things. The routine will be wrong in small ways. And because it's wrong in small ways, the team will lose faith in it as a document, and they'll go back to their own habits. Then you're back where you started, except now there's a laminated sheet on the wall that everyone is ignoring, which is worse than no sheet at all.
The fix is unglamorous. Sit down with the team. Watch them work. Ask "why do you do it in that order?" Write up what they actually do. Let them mark it up and change it. Then everybody signs it, including you. Review it every quarter, or every time something significant changes (new equipment, new menu, new staff member who's been there long enough to have opinions).
Common mistakes
- Writing the routine in the office, not on the floor: If you draft it sitting at a laptop without watching a shift run, you will get the order wrong and miss the small details that make it actually work. Draft it on the prep bench.
- Making it too long: A 40-item checklist gets skimmed. Aim for the smallest list that covers what genuinely matters. If something can be assumed (turning on the lights), leave it off.
- No sign-off: A checklist without a signature is a suggestion. The signature is the moment of accountability and it changes behaviour more than any amount of training.
- Putting it in a binder: Binders are where routines go to die. Laminate, pin, stick to the wall. Make it easier to follow than to ignore.
- Never reviewing it: Menus change, equipment changes, staff change. A routine written 18 months ago is probably 30% wrong by now. Quarterly review, minimum.
- Treating new starters as if they'll absorb it by osmosis: They won't. Walk them through the routine on day one, watch them do it on day two, sign it off on day three.