The Roster Swap at Harvest Café
Harvest Café is a small hospitality business with 11 employees, six of them part-time students. The award (industrial agreement) requires a minimum 3-hour engagement per shift and a 10-hour break between shifts. Priya, a Year 12 student, is rostered Saturday 4 pm–10 pm. On Thursday she asks her supervisor, Marco, to swap with Dylan so she can attend a family event. Marco agrees verbally and tells Dylan, who confirms. Marco then forgets to change the published roster or notify payroll. On Saturday Priya does not arrive. Dylan is not on the roster and also does not arrive. The café is short-staffed during its busiest period, and the owner, Lena, discovers the gap at 5 pm. Lena wants to record both absences as unauthorised and issue written warnings.
1. Identify the workplace practices failures in this situation and explain who holds responsibility for each.
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The failures are layered, not a single act of disobedience.
Marco (supervisor): He approved a roster change but did not complete the administrative steps that make an approval real - updating the published roster and notifying payroll. An approval that exists only in conversation creates a reasonable expectation in both employees. Marco also failed to check coverage before agreeing. Responsibility here is procedural.
Lena (owner/manager): The published roster is the authoritative record. Lena's system allowed a verbal approval to sit unrecorded for two days with no verification step. A workplace practice that depends on one person remembering is a system weakness, not an employee failing.
Priya and Dylan: Each reasonably relied on a supervisor's approval. Priya told the person with authority to approve; Dylan was told by that same person. Neither acted dishonestly.
Conclusion: Recording both as unauthorised absences misattributes a management system failure to employees. The defensible practice is to correct the roster record, treat the absence as approved, and fix the approval-to-roster process.
2. Lena proposes issuing written warnings to both students. Evaluate this proposed action against principles of fair and lawful workplace practice, and recommend an alternative.
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A written warning is a disciplinary response that should only follow a finding that the employee breached a known obligation. Test the proposal against three principles.
1. Procedural fairness. Before any warning, the employee should know the allegation and have a chance to respond. Priya can point to Marco's approval; Dylan can point to being told by Marco. A warning issued without hearing this is procedurally unfair.
2. Proportionality and consistency. The conduct was reliance on a supervisor's instruction, not refusal to work. Punishing it more harshly than, say, lateness would be inconsistent. It also risks deterring staff from ever requesting swaps - a perverse outcome for a business that depends on flexibility.
3. Record-keeping and legal exposure. The award sets minimum engagement and break rules. If the roster is wrong, payroll may underpay or misrecord hours. Warnings do not fix that; corrected records do.
Alternative: Correct the roster retrospectively, confirm the swap in writing, and treat both absences as approved. Hold a short meeting with Marco about the approval workflow. Introduce a rule that no swap is valid until the roster and payroll are updated and the change is confirmed in writing to both employees. Document the process fix rather than disciplining students for a gap the business created.