A robust rostering system is essential in any hospitality or retail business. Ensuring you have the right number of staff rostered on will keep your customers happy, and your wage cost looking great.

On the contrary, building rosters inefficiently can be a real time-waster. So, how do you get maximum results from your roster?

Here’s five quick tips you can easily incorporate into your rostering practice today.

Utilize “Role Rostering”

First you need to work out what shifts and roles you need to fill, then costing out this plan against your employee’s hourly wages. Then, simply add the names of those staff member you wish to fill each role. Role rostering is great as is focuses on what’s best for your business. Perhaps there’s a special event in town and you anticipate being busier than usual. You need your senior employees on that can handle the pressure, but always be weary of overstaffing.

Share the top shifts

For wait and restaurant staff, certain shifts are always better than others in terms of stress and potantial for tips. These are the shifts that need the most careful management – you need to share these around fairly to ensure all staff members get their turn.

Automate rostering tasks

The more rostering tasks you automate, the more management time you free up for sorting out issues and, well, managing the business. This is where the benefits of cloud technology come into play. Modern rostering tools can provide costing models at the click of a button and can be updated in real time and sent out to employees via email or SMS.

Enable staff to plan in advance

Everyone has a busy life these days, and the more advance notice staff have of their shifts, the more you reduce unexpected absences and last-minute changes. Focus on automating your rostering system as much as possible so you can advise staff of rosters 4 weeks in advance. This will leave you with happy employees, and allowing them the opportunity to request leave early means there’s no chance of you rostering staff on when they’re not available!

Allow staff to check the roster without calling in

With a cloud-based rostering system, you can prepare the roster from anywhere. You can send a most up-to-date roster straight to an employees smart phone as an SMS or an email. They can check this and keep it on record – no more calling in to check when their shift starts! The more of your rostering tasks that can be handled in this way, the more time you free up for other tasks.