We often hear this – event companies are using excel spreadsheets, Google docs, and multiple calendars for their employee scheduling processes as well as the overall tracking of their freelance staff or crew. Crew cannot clock in and out on-site and no internal labor management process integrates or provides reporting that floats back into accounting. On top of this, event companies struggle with figuring out who is available and communicating changing event details which regularly requires making phone calls and sending emails until event teams cannot sit up straight anymore. No one likes this process, it is time-intensive and frustrating, and most would simply love to push the manual work it takes to schedule their people off on someone else.
Additionally, several people or departments are often involved in the employee scheduling and management processes – particularly in selecting and scheduling crew for an event. Unfortunately, this can mean that crew members are chosen out of habit, without much visibility into other important criteria such as travel costs, overtime, past performance, unique skills sets, and more, which may have otherwise impacted their decision. Crew “favorites” regularly get scheduled and it is hard to judge why certain people were selected over others when costs start to rise.
It’s time to get back to the basics when it comes to crew scheduling. Employee scheduling software will enable you to improve overall accountability in your crew management processes and be even more confident that you are scheduling the very best possible crew, each and every time.
What are the top 3 employee scheduling basics?
Let’s take a look:
- Make sure that you can access real-time data, at all times, and use that data to make the best decisions possible: Lack of data to really know that you are making the best employee scheduling decisions could be costing you – not only in just dollars but also in the performance of your crew. Maybe it’s understanding when someone is about to hit overtime or full-time status. Or, maybe it’s the financial impact of traveling your crew to an event vs. using a local crew. Either way, accessing real-time data is crucial to maximizing your event budget. Also, with the right data, teams can choose the right person, with the right skill set, at the right cost.
- Simplify your crew management through process automation: There are many benefits to automating your employee scheduling and management workflow. With manual processes, tasks like on-boarding new people, creating job estimates, tracking time, billing customers, paying crew or ACA reporting are difficult. When you are able to automate processes, your team becomes more productive, profitable and even more accountable.
- Be sure to reward your top performers: When you have top performers, reward them! Keep track of high-quality crew members by rating them and through performance notes. Then, make sure to give them first dibs on your events. LASSO’s employee scheduling software solution helps you manage this and allows teams to become more accountable in crewing the best people, every time.
Here at LASSO, we have the privilege of talking to event companies and learning about their struggles with manual processes, excel spreadsheets, and lack of integrated solutions every single day. It is rewarding to know that the solution that we have built specially for the event industry is going to solve these problems and have a direct impact on their bottom line.
So if you hire event staff or produce event experiences, we’d love to show you around and chat with you. Request a demo and let’s discuss how LASSO’s employee scheduling software can help improve accountability in your event crew management process.
