Employee availability

Employee availability is the record of when somebody can work: the days and times they have told you they are free, alongside anything fixed that they are not. It is the constraint a schedule is built inside, and its accuracy determines whether a published rota survives its first day.

Availability is not preference

The two get conflated and should not be. Availability is a hard boundary, usually driven by something outside work: childcare, a class, a second job, a caring commitment. Preference is softer, a wish about which of the available shifts somebody would rather have. Scheduling over a preference is a disappointment. Scheduling over an availability constraint produces a no-show, because the person genuinely cannot be there.

• Recurring weekly availability, and how far ahead it applies
• One-off exceptions for a specific date
• Whether a change needs approval or takes effect immediately
• How far in advance a change has to be submitted to affect the next rota

Keeping it current

Stale availability is worse than none, because it produces confident scheduling into hours that no longer exist. The practical fix is to make updating it trivial and to ask at the moments when it is most likely to have changed, such as at the start of a term or after a rota pattern changes. A record nobody can update from their phone in under a minute will not be updated.

“A schedule is only as good as the availability it was built from, and availability decays quietly.”