Rostering the night shift at an entertainment venue in New Zealand
A large casual crew working several areas on each weekend night of the season, allocated from their own requests instead of by whoever answered the group chat first.
No request window is open on this page; the chronometer is shown without a time.
- Draft
- Requesting
- Allocating
- Scheduled
- Revise
- Live
- Completed
Allocating. Requests are in and seats are being filled. Every roster sits at exactly one station, and each station names the one thing left to do.
Instruments drawn on an example night. This site carries no customer data.
An entertainment venue knows its busy nights months ahead, and has little room for error on them. It knows which weekends it will open. What it doesn't know until each one is close is who from its casual crew is free, which named position in which area each person would rather work, and who to call when someone drops out on the night.
Before: a group chat
For a long time the roster was a group chat. Each week someone on the operations team posted the weekend's work and asked who was in. People replied in the order they happened to see the message, so the favourite positions went to whoever was looking at their phone at the time, and the quieter members of the crew were often still unplaced when the thread had moved on. To find out who was confirmed for a position on a particular night, you scrolled back through days of messages. When someone pulled out an hour before opening, which happened most weekends with a crew that size working several areas, the same group chat was the only way to find cover, and it depended on someone free seeing the message in time.
Nobody kept a record of who had been reliable over the season, so each weekend's allocation started from nothing and leaned towards whoever was loudest in the chat.
What changed
The venue now publishes each weekend's work as named positions: a specific location inside a specific area, each with its own capacity. That replaces the old "who's in this weekend?" post. Each crew member gets a private link by SMS and email, unique to them for that period, with no app to install and nothing to log in to. They open it, see which positions are on offer on which nights, and request the ones they want.
After the request window closes, the operations team allocates from one board. Requesters are sorted by priority and by a reliability score built from their own attendance, and people who weren't placed go on a ranked standby list for the night instead of hearing nothing. When the team confirms the roster, everyone placed and everyone on standby is told where they stand before the weekend.
On the night, a supervisor marks attendance on a phone, position by position. If someone withdraws through their link, or is marked unwell, unavailable or gone on the night, their seat is offered to the standby list with a one-time claim link. The first valid claim takes it, and anyone who opens the link after that sees it has gone.
How the season runs now
Each weekend follows the same cycle. The positions are published, the crew request through their links, and the team allocates by priority and reliability and confirms. The night runs on a phone, with attendance and standby cover. When a weekend's roster is completed, the reliability history it adds goes into the next allocation, so the people who turn up consistently move up the list without anyone having to remember who they are. The Thursday scramble through the group chat has become a published roster the crew can check when it suits them, with a standby list ready before the first dropout of the night.