Availability

A schedule built on stale availability produces conflicts that look like unreliability and are not.

What to collect

Which days and times a person can work.

Hard constraints: a class, a caring responsibility, a second job, transport with a last bus.

Preferences, marked as preferences, which is different.

Minimum and maximum hours they want.

And the date it was recorded, which is the field everyone omits and the one that matters.

Hard against soft

A hard constraint is one where scheduling against it means the person cannot work.

A preference is one where they would rather not.

Conflating them produces two failures: treating a preference as immovable wastes capacity, and treating a constraint as a preference produces a missed shift that gets recorded as absence.

Ask explicitly which each item is, and record it.

Keeping it current

Availability changes: terms start, children change schools, second jobs end.

Most operations collect it at hire and never again, which means the data is wrong for anyone employed more than a year.

Review it twice a year, as a two-minute conversation or a form.

And after any signal: repeated declines of a particular slot, swap requests in a pattern, a change in someone's circumstances they mentioned.

The good-faith estimate

General orientation, not legal advice.

Several jurisdictions require a written estimate of expected hours and schedule at hire, and expect the actual schedule to resemble it.

Which means the availability conversation at hire is now a record with consequences rather than an informal chat.

Write it down, give them a copy, and revisit it when the pattern diverges.

Where it goes wrong

Availability treated as a bid for shifts, so people overstate it to get hours and then decline.

Which is a signal about hours allocation rather than about honesty: if the only way to get enough hours is to claim full availability, people will.

Fix the hours problem and the availability data becomes accurate.

The measure

Conflicts per published rota — shifts scheduled against a recorded constraint.

Above a handful, the data is stale or the builder is ignoring it.

Both are findable in an afternoon, and the second is worth knowing about.

Record the date

The field everyone omits and the one that matters most.

Availability collected at hire and never revisited is wrong for anyone employed more than a year.

A dated record makes staleness visible and turns a review into a routine task rather than a judgement call.

Anything older than six months is a prompt to ask, which takes two minutes.

Check the difficult case

Use employee activity tracking to frame one representative case. The useful evidence is what happens when an employee questions an entry and a manager must correct and export it.