A great hospitality roster balances demand, labour cost, and staff preferences, not just filling shifts.
Publishing rosters early and sharing the good shifts fairly keeps your casual and part-time staff loyal.
Many Australian hospitality venues roster with the Hospitality Industry (General) Award (MA000009) in mind.
Rostering software like Deputy brings demand, availability, swaps, and pay rules into one place.
The barista pulling your regulars' morning coffee, the barback keeping the floor running on a Saturday night. Your staff are at the heart of your venue, and the roster you hand them shapes how their week feels.
There are plenty of perks you can give your staff, and a good roster is one you might not have thought of. Get the roster right, and you'll have a happy, productive team looking after your customers. Get it wrong, and you'll waste time and money scrambling to fill gaps.
Demand for hospitality staff keeps climbing, too. Australia's hospitality shift activity rose 28% by late 2025, according to Deputy's Big Shift Report, so your roster has to flex with busy trading. Here are eight staff rostering tips to help you avoid the most common mistakes and build rosters your team will love.
Start with demand, not names
Before you slot in a single person, look at when your venue is actually busy. A great roster starts with your trading patterns: the weekday coffee run, the Friday dinner rush, the quiet Monday afternoon. Match your staffing to those peaks and troughs first, then fill in the names.
This is what it means to roster to demand. You're staffing the work, not the habit of who usually shows up. It also keeps your labour cost in check, since labour is one of the biggest slices of a venue's revenue.
When you build a roster, it helps to check a few things:
Your expected covers or sales for each day and daypart
The roles you need on the floor, in the kitchen, and behind the bar
Your rough labour cost against forecast sales
Any events, public holidays, or promotions that shift demand
Ask your team how they want to work
You're still the manager and you call the shots, but a roster that takes preferred hours and days into account is a more equitable and fair one. It also helps you hold on to the people you've trained, which matters when Australia's job mobility rate hit 7.7% in the year to February 2025.
That matters more than ever with a younger crew. Gen Z now makes up 64% of Australian hospitality shift workers, up from 61% a year earlier, according to Deputy's Big Shift Report. They expect flexibility, mobile access, and fairness, so ask them how and when they want to work.
Regular check-ins are a natural place to talk about it. Performance reviews are a time to work with your team and help them grow, and you can weave rostering into that chat. If someone's juggling study and a second job, you might revisit the shifts you give them so they can do their best work. Keep a shared record of preferred hours so nothing gets lost.
Build your roster well ahead of time
Last-minute rostering piles pressure on managers and stress on staff. Give your team plenty of notice and they get more control over their lives, which helps them show up productive.
Early rosters matter more now because your staff are stretched across jobs. Poly-employment, or holding more than one job, has hit a decade high, and Gen Z accounts for 72% of poly-employed shift workers, according to Deputy's Big Shift Report. The sooner you publish, the easier it is for people to plan around their other commitments.
Depending on your award, enterprise agreement, employment contracts, and applicable workplace laws, requirements around roster changes or notice periods may apply. Check the industrial instrument and legal requirements that apply to your business before finalising your roster.
Make the roster easy to access anywhere
Your team needs to see their roster anytime and anywhere. When you build employee rosters, you might be used to pinning a printed copy up out the back. That's a nice extra, but sharing rosters digitally is more practical and better for the planet.
Use a workforce management tool with a mobile app for managers and staff, then share the roster through the app. That way anyone on your team can check when they're working, wherever they are.
Keep communication two-way
Good managers don't just post the new roster and go quiet. Build two-way communication into how you roster.
Use a built-in communication tool to share the roster along with any updates worth knowing. Whether your people work in one venue or several, you can keep every message in one place. Your team will appreciate the context, and they'll be happier to get their roster because of it.
Attach tasks to every shift
It's your new barista's first Monday morning rush. They clock in on time, but as the queue grows, so does the panic. What's the drill for the rush, and what do they do when the coffee cups run out?
Knowing when they work is only half of what your staff need. They also want to know what to get done during those hours. Does the barback rotate the laundry on Saturdays? Does the front-of-house crew reset the floor before close?
Attach tasks to each shift so your team knows exactly what needs doing when they're on the clock.
