Ask any rostering coordinator in an NDIS organisation how they find out about worker availability and the answer is usually some combination of a shared spreadsheet that may or may not be up to date, text messages sent on Thursday for next week's roster, and a working knowledge of which workers are "usually available" — knowledge that lives entirely in one person's head.
When coordinators build rosters based on assumed availability rather than confirmed availability, the downstream effects compound quickly. Shifts are assigned to workers who then decline or simply do not show up. Coordinators spend significant time on the phone re-filling shifts. Workers who are repeatedly assigned to shifts they have indicated they cannot work become frustrated and disengaged. And last-minute shift filling frequently goes to whichever workers are available at short notice, regardless of cost-effectiveness.
Effective availability management has three components: worker-controlled availability input (workers update their availability directly through a mobile-accessible system, specifying which days and times they are available each week); coordinator visibility (when building next week's roster, coordinators can immediately see which eligible workers have indicated availability, filtered by qualification, location, and hour cap); and pre-publication reconciliation (before the roster is sent to workers, an automated check flags any shift assigned to a worker who has not indicated availability for that time slot).
Even with excellent availability management, there will always be shifts that cannot be filled from the regular team. An open shift marketplace is the structured alternative to the phone-call scramble. When a shift cannot be allocated through the standard process, it is published as an open shift visible to all workers who meet the eligibility criteria. Workers can apply from their phone, and the coordinator can award the shift to the best-fit applicant without a single phone call.
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