Shift schedules under the Czech Labour Code

Shift schedules are governed by Section 84 of the Czech Labour Code (Act No. 262/2006 Coll.) (in Czech): the employer must draw up a written schedule of weekly working hours and inform employees of it no later than 2 weeks before the start of the period for which the working hours are scheduled. With a working hours account the deadline is 1 week. Both deadlines can be shortened, but only by agreement with the employee, not by a decision of the employer.

• The schedule must be in writing and employees informed 2 weeks in advance, with a working hours account 1 week.
• The same deadline applies to a change to an already issued schedule, not just to the first one.
• The length of a shift must not exceed 12 hours.
• There must be at least 11 hours of continuous rest between shifts.
• Ordered overtime is capped at 8 hours a week and 150 hours per calendar year.

What exactly Section 84 requires

The provision is short and rests on three elements. The schedule must be in writing, it must cover weekly working hours, and the employee must be informed of it in advance. If any one of them is missing, the obligation has not been met, even if people knew when to come in.

The deadline is 2 weeks before the start of the period for which the working hours are scheduled. It is therefore counted from the start of the scheduled period, not from a particular person's first shift. With a working hours account the Act shortens the deadline to 1 week.

The last part of the sentence tends to be overlooked: unless the employer agrees a different notification period with the employee. An agreement is the legal route to shorter notice, but it is an agreement, that is, a bilateral act. A clause in the work rules saying that the schedule is issued three days in advance does not replace it.

A change to the schedule has the same deadline as the schedule

The Act speaks of informing employees of the schedule or of a change to it. It follows that swapping a shift next week is a change to the schedule and the same two-week notice applies to it.

This is where a service company's plan parts ways with the rules most often. Emergencies, sickness and a delayed delivery of materials are normal operations and rescheduling is unavoidable. The Labour Code does not prohibit it, it simply has no special regime for it: either the employee is informed in time, or the employee has accepted the change on the basis of an agreement.

The practical consequence is that companies that reschedule often cannot do without individual agreements on a shorter notification period. The other option is to schedule shorter periods and change less.

The limits the schedule has to fit within

The schedule is not a blank canvas. Apart from the notification deadline, it has to meet several limits that apply regardless of how the work is scheduled.

Weekly rest is often simplified to 35 hours. That is not how the Act puts it: Section 92(1) requires at least 24 hours of continuous rest, which must be immediately followed by daily rest under Section 90(1), and only the sum of the two is the continuous weekly rest. For a juvenile employee it is at least 48 hours.

Shortening is only possible in the listed cases, for example in continuous operations or when averting an emergency. Even there a cap applies: weekly rest must not fall below 24 hours and over a period of 2 weeks the employee must receive at least 70 hours.

Where the plan and the rules most often part ways

The first place is the emergency call-out. The Act provides for it in Section 90(3), which allows daily rest to be shortened to as little as 6 hours if this is necessary to avert an emergency or other extraordinary event. The condition is that the following rest period is extended by the time it was shortened. It is precisely the extension that goes unrecorded in practice, and then nobody can prove it happened.

The second place is on-call time mistaken for a shift. The time when a technician is available is not a shift and is not entered in the schedule in the same way. When the plan treats it as a regular assignment, it yields a different shift length and a different rest period from what actually took place.

The third place is two parallel sets of records. The schedule is kept in one spreadsheet, the hours actually worked in another, and there is no link between them. The difference only shows up at the end of the month when payroll is processed, which is the moment when nothing can be done about it any more.

What this means for a service company's plan

The schedule has to be in one place and visible as a whole. As long as planning is done person by person, you cannot tell who is missing rest between shifts, because that gap arises between two entries, not inside one.

In the planning board technicians are in rows and days in columns, so overlapping assignments are visible and the app reports a clash on save. The rest between shifts is not calculated from it automatically, but adjacent assignments sit next to each other and do not disappear between sheets.

Absence belongs in the same plan as work. Capacity and skills keep track of who is free, who has the required qualification and who is absent. Without that, holidays are planned from a different spreadsheet and the schedule drifts away from them.

When you do not need to deal with this

If you have evenly scheduled working hours, a steady weekly routine and rescheduling once in a while, a schedule in a spreadsheet will do and you meet the obligation by sending it out in advance. The Act does not require a tool, only a written form and timely notification.

The difference arises with uneven scheduling, with a working hours account and anywhere the plan changes during the period. From that point on, the hardest part is not drawing up the schedule but proving when it was issued and when the employee learnt of the change.

This article describes the general rules of the Labour Code as of the date of publication and does not replace a legal assessment of a specific situation. A collective agreement, internal regulation or special rules for certain operations may refine the rules.

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