Many small businesses have variable daily staffing, where the total number of people “on staff” is bigger than the number of people “on duty” at any given moment. (Think small retailers, cafés and service-providing companies like caterers, contractors and consultancies.)

And many of those places still figure out their schedules basically with a paper and pencil, or maybe they use a spreadsheet – as if it were a piece of paper.

This involves solving multidimensional Tetris problems every week (or maybe every single day). And to do it “right,” you have to balance:

• when you need people
• which roles you need to staff
• what your employees’ availability is
• what level of proficiency is required for each role for each time window
• what level of proficiency each employee has
• what your employees’ role preferences are
• what skills does your organization most need to grow
• what skills does each employee want to grow

SO MANY PARTS! And if somebody gets sick, you have to re-solve the puzzle again. Even if you’re a “calendar savant,” you probably prefer other parts of your job.

Enter Davoda Scheduler

If those problems sound familiar, whether you manage people who work on a time-based or project-based rhythm, Davoda Scheduler will:

• Reduce your time and cognitive load costs required for roster building, with lower failure rates and frustration than solving in your head
• Improve your employees engagement and retention – and happiness! by aligning your business needs with worker requests and proficiencies, and giving you visibility on how often you honored an employee’s preferences compared with when you couldn’t.
• Minimize your business risk and streamline growth opportunities with shadow-and-mentor pairing for most-needed roles
• Allow higher-quality workload shifting to resolve on-the-day employer needs and employee requests
• Help grow your people into the roles you most need to develop and match folks who don’t have a specific skill yet with a mentor who does
• Build up a corpus of experience data for each participant from ad-hoc notes and worked time, so next week your rosters reflect the skills your team developed this week.

It’s easy to start to use Davoda at your company without needing to integrate it into anything or even get anybody’s permission.

Scheduler walks you through defining your needs and your employees’ availability and preferences. You can just type the names of your folks in, and we’ll help you get them sorted. It’s just 4 steps:

1. Type in your people’s names (once)
2. Pick the skills you (or they) prefer (once)
3. Swipe in when you need staff (once)
4. Swipe in their availability

And ta-da! Davoda Scheduler builds you fully-functional rosters that you can tune as needed.

You can combine roles based on the real way your business works: if a single person can open the shop, make coffees, work register, take inventory, and so on, you can staff them that way. (Not every role combines well with others: someone who works a back-of-house role as a cook doesn’t usually work a front-of-house waitstaff role at the same time.)

If you use HR software like Gusto, we plan to let you pull data from there to fill in your folks, and then push the roster back out. Let us know if you’d like to see support a particular system.

Who Davoda Scheduler is for

Scheduler is primarily for companies or teams with 5-100 people and variable daily staffing, where number of people “on staff” may be significantly bigger than number of people “on duty” at any given moment. (Those folks are frequently, but not exclusively hourly, and sometimes they are contract workers.)

Often, those employees’ schedules fluctuate based on demand, shifts, or have employees who don’t work the same hours every day or week. A retailer might have many people working during busy times, and fewer when traffic is light. A coffee shop may be open for long hours, where no single employee works the entire duration.

A few of the businesses Scheduler can help:

• Food service: restaurant, café, catering
• Retail: grocery, gas station, clothing store
• Services: dentist/physician, consultancy, bakery, event planner, media production, real estate, administrative services
• Construction: general contractors and subcontractors
• Other organizations, incl volunteer-driven or volunteer-reliant ones: civic orgs like museums, advocacy orgs, sporting officials (roller derby, soccer, etc.)

Who Scheduler isn’t for (probably)

If all your people come in every day (like if you run a software development shop with 20 folks who all come in every day), you probably don’t use us, but you might – Scheduler can help you make sure that your folks are getting mentor opportunities in the areas you need to grow.

At Davoda, we are committed to transforming how small businesses manage their day-to-day staffing needs with Scheduler, our easy-to-use, need- and resource-aware staff roster building tool.

Sign up for Davoda Scheduler today!