How one scheduling manager cut staff no-shows by 90% in 60 days

Business

Libby’s phone was in her hand, and the list in front of her had about 200 names on it.

It was a Friday evening in summer. The Los Angeles catering company she scheduled for had a wedding to serve that night, and the first shift was booked: ten servers and two bartenders. Not one of them had turned up. Libby started at the top of the roster and worked her way down, calling and texting, hoping someone was free and close enough to make it.

She got enough people there to save the night. “The party turned out okay,” she said afterwards. But she and the owner made a decision that evening. This was never going to happen again.

The invisible job holding the business together

Every business that runs on shifts has someone like Libby. If they stopped doing their job, the whole operation would grind to a halt within a week.

The catering company had around 20 full-time staff, about 200 part-time workers, and roughly $4 million in annual revenue. In a typical 40-hour week, Libby scheduled about 15 parties, which meant hundreds of individual shifts. Her toolkit was handwritten notes, Google Sheets, phone calls, text messages, and Facebook. Nothing was shared with the rest of the team. The knowledge of who was reliable and who could be counted on at short notice lived in her head and in her notebooks.

Even with all that effort, the shifts weren’t holding. On the company’s busiest days, Libby estimated that about half of scheduled workers either arrived late or didn’t arrive at all. The company’s case study describes her at the time as “spinning her wheels and grinding her teeth.”

Why absences hit event businesses so hard

In event planning and catering, one unplanned absence can wreck a client’s most important day. A wedding happens once, a gala has a fixed start time, and nobody waits politely while a replacement bartender drives across town.

Every event is also a shop window. Guests at a beautifully run wedding become the next enquiry.

Three changes that turned it around

The company moved its employee scheduling and absence tracking into Roosted, a workforce management platform built for shift-based teams. Onboarding took less than a week. Three changes made the biggest difference.

1. Putting her most reliable people first

Libby began each event by inviting the specific workers she trusted most, then letting the system fill the remaining slots from the wider pool. Her best people got first pick of the shifts, which gave them a reason to keep choosing her company over other work.

2. A confirmation before every single shift

Before each shift, every worker had to reply to a text or email confirming they were coming. If someone stayed silent, Libby knew about it hours in advance, with time to line up a replacement calmly. A gap she spotted at noon could usually be filled with a couple of calls, long before the first guests arrived.

3. Tracking who actually turned up

The system recorded lateness, no-shows, and performance on every shift automatically. Over time, clear patterns emerged, and more shifts went to the people who arrived on time while fewer went to those who didn’t.

For the first time, the whole team could see the attendance record Libby had been carrying around in her head, so decisions no longer depended on her being the one in the room.

The results after 60 days

The company saw a marked improvement from the very next weekend. Sixty days in, the numbers looked like this:

With scheduling down to under 10 hours, most of Libby’s 40-hour week was free for other work. Staff turnover fell as well, although the case study doesn’t give a figure for it.

What any manager can take from Libby’s story

The same steps work at a much smaller scale. A small business owner with six weekend staff, a salon owner covering appointments, or an events freelancer hiring helpers for a single conference all face the same risk. These are the steps that made the difference for Libby:

• Ask for a confirmation the day before. A one-line message asking people to reply “yes” turns silent absences into early warnings. Set a deadline, and line up a backup for anyone who hasn’t replied by then.
• Write down who shows up. Even a single spreadsheet column marked “on time, late, or absent” builds a clear picture within weeks.
• Reward reliability with first choice. The people who never let you down deserve the best shifts, and offering them first pick keeps them loyal.
• Get it out of one person’s head. If all your scheduling knowledge lives with one person, your business stops when they’re off sick. Put it somewhere the whole team can see.
• Measure your own time. Track how many hours a week go into scheduling. If the number keeps climbing as you grow, your current system has reached its limit.

Where to start

If you only change one thing this month, make it the confirmation text. It costs nothing, and it works with a spreadsheet as well as with scheduling software.

Author bio: Derick Dorner, CEO & Co-Founder at Roosted, a workforce management platform that helps event staffing agencies, caterers, security firms, and other shift-based teams schedule staff, confirm shifts, track attendance, and connect hours to payroll.