NDIS Workforce Planning, Rostering and Scheduling: How to Bring Down Cost Base and Maintain Service
The High Stakes of Care Workforce Design
Across Australia, National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) providers, aged care organisations and government-funded care services are under increasing pressure. Inflationary cost pressures, increased scrutiny on service quality, a tightening labour market, and the ongoing shift toward consumer-directed care have made one thing clear: effective workforce planning is no longer a back-office function—it's a strategic imperative.
Care is personal. It happens in homes, communities, and facilities. But behind the scenes, the ability to put the right person in the right place at the right time—at the right cost—is where organisational sustainability lives or dies.
Rostering inefficiencies, workforce under-utilisation, or last-minute agency reliance can quickly balloon into unsustainable operating costs. At the same time, the complexity of service delivery—particularly in-home and mobile care—requires organisations to maintain high service responsiveness without letting costs spiral out of control.
At Trace Consultants, we’ve worked with providers across aged care, disability support, and government services to transform how they plan, schedule, and deploy their frontline teams. In this article, we explore the key levers to reduce workforce costs while maintaining service, and how you can start applying them today.
The Cost Challenge: Why Workforce is Your Largest Lever
It’s no secret: labour costs account for more than 60–70% of operating expenses across care-based organisations.
But it’s not just about wages.
The cost base is influenced by:
- Inefficient rostering patterns
- Under-utilised travel time
- Excessive overtime
- Overuse of high-cost agency staff
- Misalignment of staffing to demand
- Poor visibility across permanent, part-time, and casual staff capacity
- Fragmented scheduling systems
In the NDIS space, complexity multiplies due to variable funding structures, individualised care plans, location-based workforce challenges, and compliance requirements.
Without the right planning and scheduling infrastructure, organisations are often flying blind—leading to missed visits, cost overruns, or care that simply doesn’t meet expectations.
What “Good” Looks Like: Workforce Excellence in NDIS and Aged Care
Organisations that lead in workforce optimisation tend to exhibit several shared traits:
- Clear service design and workforce demand models based on geography, time-of-day, and skill type
- Optimised workforce mix (e.g., FTE, part-time, casual, agency) suited to demand variability
- Integrated rostering and scheduling tools that reflect real-time changes and preferences
- KPI visibility across cost per hour, billable vs. non-billable hours, utilisation, and missed shifts
- Minimal travel time and high shift continuity
- Forecasting capability that enables proactive recruitment or shift balancing
Most importantly, they are data-led in how they forecast demand, schedule supply, and track performance.
This requires a maturity lift in processes, people capability, and enabling technology. And that’s where many providers are now investing.
Five Levers to Drive Workforce Efficiency While Preserving Service
1. Align Workforce Strategy to Client Demand
Start by clearly defining your client promise:
- What type of service are you delivering?
- When do clients need it most (days, times)?
- Where are the clients located?
- What level of qualifications or support are required?
This demand profile should drive your workforce strategy, not the other way around.
Tools like heatmaps, time-of-day demand analysis, and client clustering can reveal patterns that help you structure a more efficient service model.
Trace Consultants helps organisations build demand profiles using historical data, booking trends, and NDIS plan analysis. This sets the foundation for workforce redesign.
2. Optimise Workforce Composition and Mix
Most providers carry a sub-optimal mix of:
- Full-time employees
- Part-time and casual workers
- Agency or contingent staff
- Subcontracted labour
Each has its place. But the mix must reflect the volatility of demand across services, time, and geography.
Over-reliance on casual or agency staff leads to cost blowouts, inconsistent care, and administrative overhead.
Under-leveraging permanent part-time staff can leave capacity on the table.
The right approach often involves building roster-friendly part-time models, training for broader skill coverage, and reducing dependency on high-cost temp options.
Trace works with clients to model the “future state” workforce mix aligned to demand and rostering best practice.
3. Improve Rostering and Scheduling Practices
Here’s where the rubber hits the road.
Good planning means nothing if it doesn’t translate into efficient, fair, and client-aligned rosters.
Common pain points we see include:
- Manual rostering using spreadsheets or basic scheduling tools
- Inconsistent shift allocation processes across service types
- Lack of continuity for clients or fragmentation of worker hours
- Excessive non-billable time due to gaps, travel, or cancellations
Modern rostering platforms can support:
- Optimised shift allocation based on distance, availability, continuity, preferences
- Automated travel time calculations and route optimisation
- Integration with demand forecasting engines and HR systems
- Real-time visibility of shift gaps and worker availability
Trace supports providers to assess current scheduling maturity, select fit-for-purpose technologies, and implement best practice scheduling governance frameworks.
4. Leverage Data to Improve Utilisation and Reduce Cost Per Hour
Understanding your labour costs shouldn’t be guesswork.
Yet many providers struggle to answer:
- What’s our true cost per hour of care?
- How much of our staff time is billable?
- Where are we seeing the highest leakage or inefficiency?
Dashboards that track cost per service type, staff utilisation, unavailable hours, overtime, and shift-fill rates are critical.
We help build reporting frameworks that don’t just inform—but enable managers to take action.
That could be:
- Rebalancing workloads
- Coaching underperforming team leaders
- Reallocating hours
- Addressing gaps in team coverage
5. Strengthen Planning and Forecasting Capability
Too often, rostering teams are reactive.
By embedding a demand-led planning cycle, your organisation can forecast future workforce requirements based on expected:
- Care hours
- Client onboarding
- Seasonality
- Geographic expansion
- NDIS funding cycles
With this foresight, recruitment, training, and rostering become proactive. You avoid lurching from crisis to crisis or building a workforce that doesn’t reflect client needs.
Trace Consultants brings forecasting models used in retail, health, and logistics sectors into the care context—enabling a more mature, analytical approach to workforce planning.
The Role of Technology: Choosing the Right Tools
There is no shortage of workforce and rostering platforms—AlayaCare, Lumary, Skedulo, ShiftCare, Humanforce, and others are commonly used across the sector.
But technology alone won’t solve broken rostering processes or a misaligned workforce model.
The right approach involves:
- Functional requirement development based on current vs. future state needs
- Assessment of system interoperability (HR, payroll, CRM, finance)
- Clear business case for investment (cost saving, service uplift)
- Strong change management and governance
Trace Consultants often supports clients with end-to-end technology reviews, vendor selection, implementation support, and benefits tracking—ensuring tools deliver real value, not just more complexity.
Redesigning for Home-Based and Mobile Care
As government policy continues to push toward community and home-based care, the challenge of rostering becomes even harder.
You now need to account for:
- Variable travel times
- Suburb-based zoning
- Client preferences for continuity
- Shift clustering across areas
- Route optimisation
Trace has worked with providers to develop rostering zones, mobile-first staff schedules, and route-based planning tools. These reduce non-billable hours and improve reliability—without adding cost.
Compliance, Quality and Cost: Finding the Balance
Providers often find themselves in a tug-of-war between:
- Cost efficiency
- Compliance and risk
- Service quality and continuity
- Workforce satisfaction and wellbeing
Poor rostering leads to burnout. Excessive agency use risks compliance. Budget cuts impact service access.
The only solution is smarter workforce design and stronger operating discipline—backed by data, process maturity, and the right tech.
How Trace Consultants Can Help
At Trace Consultants, we specialise in workforce planning, scheduling optimisation, and operating model transformation across complex service environments.
We’ve supported aged care organisations, disability services, health agencies, and government departments to:
- Build demand and workforce forecasting models
- Redesign rostering and scheduling processes
- Select and implement fit-for-purpose workforce tech
- Analyse and optimise workforce composition and cost base
- Strengthen KPI frameworks and reporting
- Improve service consistency, staff satisfaction and continuity
Our heritage in supply chain planning and operational optimisation gives us a different lens: we bring rigour, precision, and practical solutions—tailored to the nuances of human-centred service delivery.
Getting Started on Your Workforce Efficiency Journey
If you're an executive in the NDIS, aged care, or broader government-funded care system, now is the time to act.
The market is shifting. Service delivery is getting more complex. Labour will remain tight for the foreseeable future.
You can’t control funding levels or government policy—but you can control how effectively your workforce is planned, scheduled, and deployed.
Start by asking:
- Do we understand our demand profile?
- Are our rostering and scheduling practices helping or hurting?
- What’s our true cost per hour of care—and how do we improve it?
- Is our workforce mix aligned to our model of care?
- Are we using data and tech effectively to support decision making?
If you’re not confident in the answers, Trace Consultants is here to help.
Looking to reduce your cost base while improving service consistency?
Contact Trace Consultants to explore how better workforce planning and rostering can transform your organisation.