Behind the schedule, people: three business owners on their day-to-day

“In a restaurant, two hands fewer, two feet fewer, that’s a lot.”

For Pauline Nuñez, founder of Terrenal, a restaurant serving Peruvian-inspired signature cuisine, that sentence sums up a reality every independent restaurateur knows well.

Her restaurant has twelve staff, some of them part-time. One absence, one late arrival or one change in availability can quickly upset how a service is organised.

“The biggest challenge in managing our team is always the human side,” she explains.

In small businesses, the manager has to make sure the right people are there at the right time, while taking everyone’s constraints into account.

But behind the schedule on the wall lies less visible work too: collecting availability, preparing the hours, passing on changes and keeping track of the hours worked.

At Chez mon Oncle in Nyon, a family restaurant for three generations, Margaux Kuster remembers the old ways of organising.

“It was sheets of paper pinned behind a door, which often blew away.”

Hours worked were written down in binders. A familiar method, but with one drawback: an hour not noted straight away could be forgotten.

At Terrenal, Pauline prepared the schedule in Excel.

“The main problem with Excel is the time it takes,” she sums up.

In Gland, Johan Marguerat had chosen another method: WhatsApp.

At Maison Marguerat, Malakoffs are a family story. Johan carries on this tradition from the canton of Vaud and, since 2024, has been selling them through many outlets across Switzerland.

To organise his team, he used to contact each member of staff individually, wait for their replies, then copy their availability into his notes.

“What took the most time and energy was the back and forth: chasing the people who hadn’t replied, copying out every availability by hand, checking I hadn’t forgotten anything…”

Three different experiences, but one shared difficulty: the time spent gathering, updating and checking the information needed to organise the team.

Paper, Excel or WhatsApp can work perfectly well in some situations. Their limits show when hours change often and information has to move between several people.

For Margaux, moving to Shifta changed above all how staff take part in the organisation.

Employees can swap shifts, and extras have more freedom to choose services that fit around their other commitments.

She finds she now spends much less time preparing the schedule.

At Maison Marguerat, Johan likes being able to see at a glance how many people are working each day, without going back through every message he received.

Pauline, for her part, points to how easy it is to reuse her shift templates and carry over previous weeks.

These experiences show an interesting shift: the manager stays in control of the schedule, but the coordination no longer necessarily rests on them alone.

When availability, requests and changes are gathered in one shared app, staff can play a bigger part in organising their own work.

Managing a team does not stop once the schedule is published.

Services can run late, hours can change, and the hours actually worked can differ from the ones planned.

At Chez mon Oncle, tracking hours by hand was one of the main difficulties of the old way of working.

For Pauline, access to the history of hours and changes is another important advantage.

“It creates a certain trust for the employees,” she stresses.

A history anyone can look up lets staff find their recorded hours and understand any corrections. The employer, in turn, has information that is easier to check.

This transparency can help limit misunderstandings and build trust on both sides.

At Maison Marguerat, Johan highlights a further benefit: preparing the monthly figures.

His hourly-paid staff record their working time in Shifta. At the end of the month, he can export the period he needs and send the file to his accountant to prepare the payroll.

That way he no longer has to contact each employee to piece together the hours worked.

For a small business, this continuity between the schedule, clocking in and the monthly figures can save a good deal of time, without removing the checks that are still needed.

Going digital does not depend on features alone.

Pauline and Margaux had both looked at other software, but found the prices high for small independent venues.

Johan, for his part, points to the balance between what Shifta costs and the time he saves.

Simplicity and support matter too.

Margaux particularly appreciated meeting Shifta’s founders in person, after dealing with other suppliers only remotely.

Her experience is a reminder of something often underestimated: a tool is only truly useful if it is accessible and adopted by the people who have to use it.

For small businesses, modernising how they work should not mean adding a new layer of complexity.

What stands out in what Pauline and Margaux say is that both put human relationships at the heart of their work.

Pauline stresses the empathy and flexibility needed to build a team that lasts.

For Margaux, what matters most is that staff are happy to come to work, get on with each other and enjoy sharing their days.

Technology alone does not create a good working atmosphere. But hours that are easier to reach, better-coordinated changes and transparent hours tracking can make life easier between managers and staff.

The experiences of Chez mon Oncle, Terrenal and Maison Marguerat show that modernising the schedule is about more than replacing paper or Excel with an app.

It can cut repetitive tasks, share information better and give teams more autonomy.

Modernising how you organise is not giving up on closeness. It is also a way of giving it more room.