Many small businesses have variable daily staffing, where the total number of people on-staff is bigger than the number of people on-duty at any given moment.

And many of those places still figure out their schedules basically with a paper and pencil, or maybe they use a spreadsheet – as if it were a piece of paper.

This involves solving multidimensional Tetris problems every week (or maybe every single day). And to do it “right”, you have to balance:

• when you need people
• which roles you need to staff
• what your employees’ availability is
• what level of proficiency is required for each role for each time window
• what level of proficiency each employee has
• what your employees’ role preferences are
• what skills does your organization most need to grow
• what skills does each employee want to grow

SO MANY MOVING PARTS – and if somebody gets sick, you have to re-solve the puzzle again. Even if you’re a “calendar savant,” you probably prefer other parts of your job.

If those problems sound familiar, whether you manage people who work on a time-based or project-based rhythm, Davoda Slate will:

• Reduce your time and cognitive load costs required for schedule building, with lower failure rates and frustration than solving in your head
• Minimize your business risk by ensuring your most-intense shifts have your most-skilled coverage.
• Improve your employees engagement and retention – and happiness! by aligning your business needs with worker requests and proficiencies
• Allow higher-quality workload shifting to resolve on-the-day employer needs and employee requests

Davoda Slate uses need and resource-awareness to help you build fully-functional schedules that you can tune as needed.

Simply define your needs and your employees’ availability and preferences, and let Davoda Slate do the rest. It’s easy to get started and even easier to use.

Slate is primarily for companies or teams with 5-100 people and variable daily staffing. They’re frequently (but not exclusively) hourly, and sometimes they are contract workers.

Often, those folks’ shifts fluctuate based on demand, or they don’t work the same hours every day or week: A retailer might have many people working during busy times, and fewer when traffic is light. A coffee shop may be open for long hours, where no single employee works the entire duration.

A few of the businesses Slate can help:

• Food service: restaurant, café, catering
• Retail: grocery, gas station, clothing store
• Services: dentist/physician, consultancy, bakery, event planner, media production, real estate, administrative services
• Construction: general contractors and subcontractors

Who Slate isn’t for (probably)

If all your people come in every day (for example, if you run a software development shop with 20 folks), you probably don’t use Slate – yet. (Though we’ve got some interesting features in the works that will help you, too).

If you’re ready for an easy, fast, hassle-free way to manage your staffing needs, Davoda Slate is for you.

It’s as simple as:

1. Mark when your shifts are
2. Type the names of your people
3. Invite them to contribute to your Slate, so they can add their own availability and preferred roles from their phone, tablet, or computer. (Or you can add that information yourself.)

And ta-da! Davoda Slate builds you fully-functional schedules that you can tune as needed.

Let us help you grow your people and your business.

We’re in alpha, and Davoda Slate is currently free. No charge. Nada.

With your help, in not too long we’ll start charging people. But the folks who’ve given us the most helpful feedback (not the most feedback, mind you :)) will stay free after that.

We want you to love us, and we appreciate your participation in making Davoda Slate a delightful change to the way people work.

And btw, we don’t plan on ever having ads on our site. You’re the customer, you’re not the product.