Everything in the guides above adds up to one practical question: what does an actually compliant weekly roster look like, start to finish? Here's the checklist, pulling every rule together in the order you'd realistically check it.
1. Before you build the week
- Confirm each staff member's employment type — full-time, part-time, or under 18 — since each runs on different hour and leave rules
- Check approved leave and any pending requests so the roster doesn't get built around someone who's actually off
- Confirm which staff are covered by Employment Act overtime/rest-day provisions (the RM4,000 threshold) and which aren't
2. While assigning shifts
- Every employee gets at least one rest day in the week — see the Rest Day Requirements guide
- No single shift exceeds the 10-hour spread-over or goes more than 5 consecutive hours without a 30-minute break — check with the Shift Break Compliance Checker
- Shifts for staff under 18 fall within young-person hour and timing limits, not standard adult rules
- Late shifts for any staff member have a real answer for safe transport and workplace security at closing
- Bad shifts (closing, weekends, holidays) are rotated fairly rather than defaulting to the same people — check with the Roster Fairness Checker
3. Before publishing
- Total overtime for the month stays under the statutory cap per employee
- Public holiday and rest-day shifts are paid at the correct rate for each staff member's pay basis — see the Public Holiday Pay guide
- The roster itself is kept as a record — required for rest-day rosters specifically, and good practice generally
4. Ongoing, not weekly
- Written contracts exist for every current staff member — see the Employment Contract guide
- EPF, SOCSO, and EIS contributions are correctly calculated on the right wage base for each employee
- Sensitive staff data (medical records, bank details) is only accessible to people who actually need it
This is exactly the set of checks ShiftMate's auto-schedule and fairness scoring are built to handle automatically, instead of running through this list by hand every week.
The practical takeaway
Most compliance failures aren't dramatic — they're small, repeated gaps in a weekly process nobody wrote down. Turning this list into an actual habit, whether by hand or with software that checks it for you, is the real fix.