We opened the first 24-hour restaurant in Cambridge in April. One of the most common things I heard when I told customers about this (after “That’s awesome!!!” or “Cambridge needs this so much!!”) was “Oh no, the poor employees!” I think some customers thought that because we were open later, everyone would have to work later. Luckily that wasn’t the case. At least most of the time.

We built 3 shifts, and assigned HFI a General Manager, an Assistant General Manager, and two Assistant Managers. Each manager would work 5 shifts per week, of 8-10 hours each. The idea was that no one would have to pull a long shift to cover the overnight. But things didn’t always work out that way. If a manager on the overnight called out sick or didn’t show up, the general manager would have to pull an all-nighter because there would be no one to bail him out.

Dave (our Vice President of Operations, I’ll introduce him in a future post) saw this happen to Joe once, and he said this is not going to happen again.  So we have a new role at Clover: overnight manager. These folks work 4 days on, 3 days off, and they alternate working weekends with the other overnight manager every two weeks. When Dave told me I said, this sounds like nurses’ hours! A super cool idea. It’s been working out much better. If you’re curious to see what late-nights are like at CloverHFI, check out our upcoming coffee and donuts event on 10/14. We’ll be making donuts and pouring coffee at the stroke of midnight.

If the idea of working late-night excites you, we’re hiring for all roles during the late night.