RosterLab Blog

Insights, tips, and updates on workforce management and employee scheduling.

user typing on a laptop

The 4 levels of staff schedule optimisation

An excellent roster is one that best meets and enables a unit’s staffing coverage requirements. Real life is complex and nuanced, so simple representations of which staff we need and when we need them can always be improved. In this article, we present four different levels of staffing optimisation. Each level represents a more complex rostering problem, allowing for more optimisation possibilities and considerably more effort and skill to construct.

Sunny Feng
arrow pointing in a mountain

Rosterlab: our official guide to rostering

There are so many ways to make a roster: fixed repeating patterns, rotating shifts, preferences, different shifts lengths, self-rostering, open shifts and more. In this guide, we present our guide for how we recommend people make and manage rosters for both optimal staff retention, and skill mix.

Sunny Feng
Roster more effectively with Excel Ep2: Sleep Days after Night Shifts

Roster more effectively with Excel Ep2: Sleep Days after Night Shifts

For those of us writing rosters with 24-hour coverage, there is the necessity to account for sleep days for those that are transitioning from night shifts to day shifts. Sometimes in the deep roster writing state, we can lose track of these things in the struggle to fill every shift. Let's set up some Excel formulas to check this for us instead of seeing it ourselves much later.

Sunny Feng
person using excel spreadsheet on desktop

Roster more effectively with Excel Ep1: Staffing level counts

Have you ever wondered how to set up your rostering spreadsheet to quickly check if you have the right number of people on every day? Maybe you already have, but you would like some colour coding or even a quick check that every day is staffed correctly. In this post, I will go over some easy-to-implement excel formulas to do just that.

Sunny Feng
Rosterlab’s New Rostering Assistant Tier - The What’s and the Why’s.

Rosterlab’s New Rostering Assistant Tier - The What’s and the Why’s.

When we set out to make an AI rostering platform, the team at Rosterlab encountered many, many Excel spreadsheets. We’ve also wound up making innumerable spreadsheets ourselves. It's part of the territory of rostering, and also part of the territory of testing a rostering AI. In this post, we go into the how what, and why of the new Rosterlab Free Tier (the who is us, and when is sign up here now).

Sunny Feng
baseball field

Rosterball - Looking into the statistics of good and bad rosters

Staff rostering has a tremendous amount in common with the ideas explored in one of my favourite movies, Moneyball. Like Brad Pitt, rosterers have to squeeze a winning amount of productivity out of their team, while staying within a limited budget.

Sunny Feng
nurse and doctors on the floor

Trade-offs upon Trade-offs, the Difficulties of Rostering

In healthcare, making a roster is easy; if you have excess staff who are happy to work whenever. If you don’t have a workplace utopia, rostering is an arduous struggle to balance the myriad trade-offs within the roster of: staffing numbers, contractual obligations, fairness, individual happiness and the hours it takes to find the right balance.

Sunny Feng