Full-service restaurant shift-swap SOP - a verbal agreement is not a swap and skill mismatch is not a swap: who swaps with whom, how far ahead, who approves, and who owns a missed shift, settled on one page

You are a policy drafting assistant for a restaurant. Draft a Shift Swap and Reschedule Policy for a full-service restaurant. Output the SOP text directly, ready to file and post on the wall - no drafting notes.

The SOP must cover exactly these six sections, numbered as shown:

1. Scope and definitions
- Swap: two people exchange shifts in the same time slot
- Reschedule: one person's shift moves to another time slot, no exchange involved
- Cover: someone temporarily takes a shift; the original owner remains assigned
- Out of scope: time-off requests (separate process) and overtime (separate approval)

2. Skill equivalence (the hard rule of this SOP)
- A cashier shift may only swap with a cashier rated Independent; same for host and order & beverage stations - no qualification, no swap; if coverage is missing, route through a reschedule instead
- Swaps involving a shift-lead shift require GM approval; peer-level approval never applies

3. Lead time and channel
- Standard: request to the scheduling supervisor in the scheduling group chat at least [24] hours ahead
- Same-day emergencies (illness, family): call the duty manager first, log it within [24] hours afterward
- No more than [N] swaps or reschedules per person per month; beyond that, GM approval

4. Approval chain
- Peer swap with skill equivalence: scheduling supervisor approves alone
- Cross-station reschedule or anything touching a shift-lead shift: scheduling supervisor plus duty manager, both signatures
- Involving an employee still on probation: the trainer must be notified and reply "can cover the station"

5. Accountability
- Once logged, attendance responsibility transfers to the covering employee; if the cover fails to show, the original owner shares liability
- Hours and any overtime pay post-swap accrue to whoever actually worked the shift; reconcile before month-end payroll
- An unlogged private swap that ends in a missed shift counts as an absence for both parties

6. Logging and audit trail
- All entries in [the log medium] with fixed fields: date / time slot / station / both names / approver / approval time
- The scheduling supervisor reconciles the log against actual attendance weekly and clears discrepancies the same week
- Log entries retained for [3] months

Constraints:
- No pay rates and no disciplinary fine amounts - those belong to HR policy; this SOP governs attendance ownership only, and anything disciplinary just says "per the employee handbook"
- No clause may conflict with employment contracts or local labor law; end the document with "Where this policy conflicts with an employment contract or the law, the latter prevails"
- Keep the whole document to one printable A4 page - it is not an employee handbook
- No culture, vision, or service-philosophy paragraphs

Why it is written this way

Shift-swap disputes rarely come from bad faith - they come from "swap" never having been defined. Does a verbal yes count? Does covering a different station count? Who owns a no-show? Every restaurant argues about it afterward because nobody wrote it down first. Section 1 splits swaps into three types because their accountability rules differ completely - merged into one concept, every clause leaks.

Skill equivalence is its own hard rule because front-of-house stations differ in what they cost when they fail: food-runner swaps carry almost no barrier, while cashier and order-taking swaps touch money and the guest experience. Without this section, the model drafts a tidy "mutual consent, supervisor approves" policy that looks complete and falls apart the first time someone swaps into the register.

The accountability clause "if the cover fails to show, the original owner shares liability" keeps the cost of swapping inside the swap decision. If only the cover were penalized, shift owners would toss shifts at anyone; joint liability makes "who do I swap with" a decision worth care. Likewise, treating unlogged private swaps as a shared absence closes the most common escape route - "but we settled it ourselves."

Lead times, monthly caps, and retention periods stay as variables because restaurants differ wildly: a peak-season house cannot always honor 24 hours, while a relaxed one worries swaps become de facto self-scheduling. Any number this template hardcoded would be rewritten by reality in week two - better to leave the blanks for the scheduler to fill.

Variables