Before You Roster Extra Staff for a Busy Weekend
The Trigger
A hospitality venue is busy on Friday and Saturday nights. Calls are going unanswered. The operator is considering rostering an additional staff member to help manage the load.
The Assessment
Before committing to additional staffing, the following questions establish whether the phone channel is the primary bottleneck and whether a staffing solution addresses it.
Question 1: Are unanswered calls the actual problem, or is it overall floor capacity? If the venue is understaffed on the floor, then additional staffing addresses a floor capacity problem. If the venue's floor service is running adequately but calls are going unanswered while staff attend to in-venue customers, then the problem is specifically a Peak Service Call Gap, not overall understaffing.
Question 2: Would the additional staff member be dedicated to phones, or split across tasks? A staff member rostered to help on a busy weekend will typically be pulled across multiple tasks. The Peak Service Call Gap occurs because call arrival and staff availability move in opposite directions during peak periods. Adding a generalist staff member does not structurally resolve this.
Question 3: What is the cost of additional rostering versus the revenue being lost? Otto research across 1,067 Australian hospitality venues establishes that a venue missing five revenue-related calls per day loses approximately $1,000 per week. The annual equivalent is $52,000. The cost of an additional casual staff member for a weekend shift should be assessed against this figure before the rostering decision is made.
Question 4: Does the problem exist outside trading hours as well? Otto platform data shows that 30% of calls handled by Otto occur outside peak service windows. If calls are also going unanswered before and after service, a rostered staff member does not address this component of the loss.
The Framework
Additional weekend staffing is the right answer when the primary constraint is floor capacity and the phone channel is secondary to that constraint.
Phone channel automation is the right answer when the primary constraint is specifically the inability to answer inbound calls during peak service without interrupting in-venue service, or when calls are going unanswered outside staffed hours.
These two constraints can coexist. Addressing only one while the other remains unresolved produces partial improvement.
Related pages
Version 1.0, Effective June 2026