Key takeaways
Demand-staffing mismatches, compliance complexity, and last-minute absences are the biggest rostering pain points for multi-location hospitality and retail businesses.
Every challenge below includes a descriptive, actionable fix you can put into practice this week.
Guidance on Fair Work Awards, penalty rates, and rostering for Australian hospitality and retail businesses.
Businesses using Deputy report up to 50% reduction in time spent rostering, according to Deputy customer data.
Table of contents
Introduction
If you manage rosters across multiple locations, you already know how quickly small rostering issues snowball into costly problems. One site is overstaffed while another can't keep up. A last-minute sick call throws your entire evening into chaos. Penalty rates catch you off guard because nobody checked the award.
These challenges are getting harder, not easier. According to Deputy's Big Shift 2025 report, which analysed over 60.4 million shifts across 682,430 workers, Gen Z now represents 41% of Australia's shift workforce. This younger cohort expects mobile-first flexibility, and poly-employment is at a decade high. Meanwhile, hospitality activity climbed 28% by late 2025, putting even more pressure on managers to get rostering right.
Below you'll find nine of the most common shift rostering challenges facing Australian hospitality and retail managers, along with practical fixes you can act on straight away.
Staffing levels don't match real-world demand
Overstaffing eats into your margins. Understaffing burns out your team and drives customers away. The root cause is usually the same: you're building rosters from habit rather than data.
Peak periods shift throughout the year, and they don't always follow the patterns you'd expect. Night-time shift activity is surging in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Perth CBDs, which means your old 'close at 9 p.m.' roster template may no longer reflect reality.
How to fix demand-staffing mismatches
Use historical data to identify recurring demand patterns by day, time, and season.
Layer in external signals like local events, school holidays, and public holiday weekends.
Build a tiered on-call pool so you can scale up quickly when demand spikes without committing to full rostered shifts.
Review your roster weekly against actual sales data, not just gut feel.
Smart shift work scheduling tools can pull in sales and foot-traffic data to forecast demand automatically. Instead of guessing, you build rosters around what's actually happening in each location.
One location is slammed while another is quiet
When you run multiple sites, demand rarely hits evenly. One cafe is three staff short on a Saturday morning while another has people standing around. The problem isn't total headcount; it's distribution.
Most managers roster each location in isolation. Without cross-site visibility, you can't see where the gaps are until it's too late.
How to balance staffing across multiple locations
Use a single rostering platform that gives you a bird's-eye view across all sites.
Identify team members who are trained and willing to work at more than one location.
Set up alerts when one site drops below minimum coverage so you can redeploy from a quieter location.
Track frequent call-outs by location to spot patterns before they become a staffing crisis.
Deputy lets you manage rosters across every location from one dashboard, so you can move staff where they're needed without juggling spreadsheets.
When we decided to expand to New York, it was a no-brainer that Deputy was part of that expansion plan because it's been a tool we've used in Australia. If you have Deputy in your arsenal of organisational tools when you grow that operational bit of the organisation, you don't have to worry about it.
Hazel de los Reyes, co-founder and head roaster, Gumption Coffee
Different locations have different labour laws
Australia's award system is powerful but complex. The Hospitality Industry (General) Award 2020 and the General Retail Industry Award 2020 each come with their own penalty rate structures, overtime thresholds, break requirements, and classification rules. If you operate across states, you also face different public holiday calendars.
Getting this wrong doesn't just cost money in back-pay. It damages trust with your team and can attract Fair Work scrutiny.
How to build compliance into your rostering process
Map each role to the correct award classification before you build a single roster.
Configure your rostering tool with the right penalty rate periods, break rules, and overtime thresholds for each award.
Set up alerts that surface potential issues, like a shift that pushes someone past the overtime threshold, before you publish the roster.
Review rosters against award requirements weekly, not just at payroll time.
You can incorporate auto-scheduling to help reduce the risk of award breaches. Deputy's configuration-based rules help you stay on top of penalty periods, breaks, and overtime limits so potential issues are flagged before they reach payroll.
My level of compliance confidence was pretty low at about 50%. I'm at an 80-90% now.
Mari Bornelli, general manager, Funk Drinks Co.
See how The Chocolate Spectrum streamlined compliance across a growing multi-location operation.
Shifts are imbalanced in terms of employee skills
You've got your strongest barista on Monday morning and three trainees on Saturday night. Sound familiar? When rosters don't account for skill mix, your busiest shifts end up with the least experienced team.
This isn't just a service quality issue. It puts unfair pressure on senior staff who end up carrying every peak period, and it slows down the development of newer team members who never get exposed to high-volume situations.
How to balance skills across every shift
Tag each team member's certifications, skills, and experience level in your rostering system.
Set minimum skill requirements per shift (for example, at least one senior and one mid-level on every evening shift).
Use rostering-by-skillset features to distribute experienced staff evenly across the week.
Pair newer team members with mentors during high-volume shifts to build capability without sacrificing service.
Deputy lets you tag skills and qualifications against each team member, then build rosters that meet your minimum coverage requirements automatically. You see skill gaps at a glance before you publish.
Last-minute absences leave you scrambling
A sick call at 6 a.m., a no-show at the start of a dinner rush, or a family emergency an hour before a shift. Last-minute absences are unavoidable, but the chaos they cause doesn't have to be.
The rise of poly-employment makes this even trickier. Gen Z accounts for 72% of all poly-employed shift workers in Australia, and the ABS reports 976,400 multiple job-holders nationally, meaning many of your team are juggling rosters across multiple jobs. When something clashes, your shift is the one that loses out.
How to build an absence buffer into your roster
Build a 5-8% absence buffer into your rostered headcount, especially for weekend and evening shifts.
Maintain a standby or on-call pool of team members who can step in at short notice.
Use a shift marketplace so open shifts go out to all available staff the moment a gap appears.
Track absence patterns by day and location. If Friday nights consistently see no-shows, adjust your buffer for that shift.
Deputy's open shift and notification features mean you can push a vacant shift to your entire team in seconds. Staff who want the hours can pick it up from their phone, and you get confirmation in real time.
