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 Slate

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

• Reduce your time and cognitive load costs required for roster building, with lower failure rates and frustration than solving in your head
• Minimize your business risk by ensuring your most-intense shifts have your most-skilled coverage.
• Improve your employees engagement and retention – and happiness! by aligning your business needs with worker requests and proficiencies
• Allow higher-quality workload shifting to resolve on-the-day employer needs and employee requests

It’s easy to start to use Davoda at your company without needing to integrate it into anything.

If you invite your employees to contribute to your Slate, they can add their availability and preferences from their phone, tablet, or computer. Or you can add that information yourself. Slate walks you through defining your needs and getting 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 3 steps:

1. Add your people
2. Mark when you need staff
3. Let them add their availability and preferred roles

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

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 Slate is for

Slate 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 Slate 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

Who Slate isn’t for (probably)

If all your people come in every day (like if you run a software development shop with 20 folks), you probably don’t use us – yet (we’ve got some interesting features in the works that will help you, too).

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

Sign up for Davoda Slate today!