How smarter rostering reduces turnover in Hospitality

If you’ve ever worked a late shift in Hospitality, you’ll know that the roster can make or break the experience. A well-balanced schedule keeps teams engaged, service smooth, and managers in control. A poorly designed roster, on the other hand, leads to burnout, no-shows, and high staff turnover.

The Hospitality sector faces one of the highest attrition rates of any industry. In 2024, research showed that turnover in Hospitality and catering reached 38.7%, with bars and clubs the worst affected, and hotels and accommodation not far behind. This level of churn is costly, disruptive, and damaging to guest experience.

One of the simplest ways to reduce this problem is smarter rostering. With the right tech tools and strategies, managers can create rosters that are fair, predictable, and compliant — and employees feel valued, supported, and more likely to stay.

Why poor rostering drives turnover

Unpredictability and stress

Unstable rosters make it hard for staff to manage personal commitments like study, childcare, or second jobs. In turn, this places extra stress on employees which can lead to burnout and hinder their overall performance.

How Humanforce helps: The Humanforce Work App lets staff view shifts, set their availability, and receive real-time notifications of changes. This transparency eliminates last-minute surprises and builds trust. They can also bid on available shifts, empowering them to build their work around their lives and not the other way around. This can improve work-life balance and make for happier, healthier staff.

Unequal distribution of shifts

Without structure, “favouritism” often creeps into rostering — some employees get the prime shifts, while others are left with late nights and weekends. Over time, this inequity erodes morale.

How Humanforce helps: Roster Manager uses drag-and-drop functionality and custom rules to distribute shifts fairly, based on worker preferences and availability, expected demand, budget, and other factors. Templates and equity rules ensure late shifts and weekends are rotated, helping managers avoid bias and keep staff satisfied.

Fatigue and burnout

When back-to-back shifts or missed rest breaks occur, staff can quickly burn out. This not only increases turnover but can also lead to safety and compliance risks.

How Humanforce helps: With Awards & Compliance, rosters are automatically checked against award-stipulated entitlements and rules. This makes it easier to manage fatigue and ensures that rest breaks are taken to ensure staff aren’t rostered beyond safe limits. Managers receive real-time alerts if a proposed shift breeches any compliance obligation.

Payroll mistakes and underpayment

In Australia, wage compliance in Hospitality has been under intense scrutiny in recent years. When hours and penalties are miscalculated, or employees are misclassified, trust is lost — and staff often leave.

How Humanforce helps: Rosters in Humanforce integrate directly with third party payroll providers, including Humanforce’s own Payroll solution. The system automatically interprets modern awards, overtime, and penalty rates, ensuring employees are paid accurately every time. This prevents costly compliance breaches and protects employee trust.

Last-minute scrambles

Sick leave and no-shows are inevitable, but how they’re handled makes the difference between a well-run shift and a disaster. Manual phone calls waste time and often lead to expensive agency replacements.

How Humanforce helps: When a shift becomes vacant, Humanforce automatically alerts the most suitable available employees. Staff can accept or decline directly via the app, cutting down on stress for managers and providing extra earning opportunities for existing staff.

How smarter rostering supports retention

1. Predictive, demand-driven rostering

Workforce management software is a rich repository of data. When historical rostering data is combined with data found in other business intelligence software like booking reservations, workforce numbers can be adapted to meet demand peaks and troughs. With data-driven rostering, managers can anticipate demand and assign staff fairly, ensuring that shifts are never under- or over-staffed.

Humanforce’s Template Manager lets venues pre-build seasonal or recurring rosters — for example, to handle Christmas peaks or weekend events. This reduces last-minute scheduling and ensures staff have plenty of notice. Using Humanforce’s Workforce Analytics tool enables a wealth of data to be used to more accurately predict staffing demand, not to mention a range of useful reporting tools to identify absenteeism, tardiness and shift acceptance rate trends.

2. Flexibility that empowers employees

Flexibility and autonomy are two top priorities for Hospitality workers, especially younger staff. Allowing employees to manage their shifts increases loyalty and reduces turnover.

With the Humanforce Work App, staff can swap or bid for shifts with colleagues, all within compliance rules. This autonomy reduces stress and helps employees balance Hospitality work with study, family, or other jobs.

3. Transparency on costs and coverage

Overtime and agency reliance often push up labour costs, leading managers to under-staff shifts. The result? Overworked employees who feel unsupported.

Humanforce links rosters to real-time labour cost projections, giving managers visibility of wages before they publish rosters.This allows them to easily see the cost of staffing decisions, helping them remain in control and within budget.

4. Accurate attendance records

Frustration often arises when hours worked don’t match hours paid. Paper timesheets or clunky sign-in systems increase errors and disputes. Manual clock-in and clock-out systems are also ripe for human error, especially if hand-written records are being kept.

Humanforce’s advanced QR clocking, as well as sophisticated facial and finger vein scanning recognition technology ensures employees can easily clock in and out using their smartphones, or on-site kiosks. These digital attendance records link attendance directly to payroll, reducing the risk of time theft, human errors, disputes, and payroll admin.

5. Compliance without complexity

Hospitality managers juggle complex award rules, especially with a mix of casuals, part-timers, and full-time staff. Missteps can be costly and demoralising if staff are paid incorrectly for the work undertaken.

By embedding compliance into every roster, Humanforce Awards and Compliance removes the guesswork and helps simplify complex awards. Staff benefit from more accurate and compliant pay, and managers avoid underpayment risks.

Smart rostering keeps your employees engaged for longer

Smarter rostering directly addresses the reasons Hospitality workers leave: fatigue, unfairness, lack of flexibility, and pay disputes. When employees feel their time is valued and their wellbeing is prioritised, they are more likely to stay loyal.

Research shows that when employees have more control over their schedules, turnover drops significantly. Harvard Business Review analysis found that stable scheduling in the Retail industry led to higher retention, productivity, and sales. The same principles apply in Hospitality.

Humanforce customers in Hospitality have reported:

• Reduced churn by offering staff more autonomy in shift management

• Less payroll error-related attrition thanks to built-in award compliance

• Lower absenteeism due to predictable and fair scheduling

About Humanforce

Humanforce is the all-in-one platform for frontline and flexible workforces, offering a truly employee centred, intelligent and compliant human capital management (HCM) suite – without compromise. Founded in 2002, Humanforce has a 2300+ customer base and over half a million users worldwide. Today, we have offices across Australia, New Zealand, the US, and the UK.

Our vision is to make work easier and life better by focusing on the needs and fulfilment of frontline workers, and the efficiency and optimisation of businesses.

To learn more about how Humanforce’s solution can help automate people processes in your business, please contact us.