Wondering how staffing is done for an event? The best producers prioritize their crew and embrace new ways of doing things.
Event production is a hard game to play. The best planned budgets are thrown out the window. Well-intentioned deadlines go whizzing by. Last-minute compromises and costs are commonplace.
At the end of the day, we do what we gotta do to put on the show because the show must go on. But there are event staffing plans you can put in place to mitigate this chaos. When you use strategies to manage your event staff in ways that actually empower them, you can ensure the success of your event.
Empowered production crew and event staff do their jobs better, leaving you to focus on the important work, not the busy work. So, here are a few key ways you can avoid the usual pitfalls and manage your event staff more effectively:
How to hire event staff and crew
You need to hire event staff – but where to begin? At the beginning, you may have all the AV freelancers you need to fill out your production crew. But once you start landing gigs outside your normal geographies, you’ll need to modify your event staffing plan to cast a wider net and identify quality audio visual labor and other live event professionals further afoot.
The pandemic and subsequent mass exodus of AV freelancers from the labor market has created an additional challenge for how to hire event staff. What do you do when your usual audio visual crew has left the industry completely? How do you recruit new AV freelancers while pandemic safety remains a concern?
Not to mention – finding the AV freelancers you want to hire is just step one. You also have to onboard them and make sure you’re collecting the signed paperwork you need to be compliant. No one wants to chase new event staff or crew on the job site and use time on the clock to fill out important paperwork.
Read all the 7 Deadly Sins of Event Crewing & Staffing
DON’T: Rely on slow, manual methods for hiring event staff and crew
“We were stuck searching through emails, trying to find old crew spreadsheets, and word-of-mouth reaching out. We didn’t have anything formal and it was really slowing us down,” said one labor coordinator recalling past mistakes.
Centralizing all of your AV freelancers and event staff contacts in one place where you can easily store and reference their historic data (like e-signed onboarding paperwork!), check their availability, and communicate with them quickly makes a huge difference. Event staffing software like that can empower you to hire event staff in a fraction of the time spent on manual searching.
Read more about the solution.
How to schedule event staff and crew
The majority of the industry, including yourself, has a certain way of doing things. When it comes to event staff scheduling, why change things up? You’ve always scheduled the audio visual jobs you needed with a Google calendar and whiteboard beside your desk. You’ve placed the event and AV staff you’ve needed on the right shifts and avoided total disaster…right?
The truth is, even if you have avoided event staff scheduling disasters up to this point, you’re not just lucky: You know how the success of an event can teeter on a knife’s edge. You know the stress of wondering if your AV freelancers will no-show. You know the pit-in-your stomach feeling of wondering whether that AV tech got your last-minute text and voicemail and will show up on time in the morning.
You don’t have to live that way. And your event staff and audio visual crew don’t want to live that way, either. Nobody likes last-minute panics and uncertainty, especially when it comes to live events.
Read all the 7 Deadly Sins of Event Crewing & Staffing
DON’T: Stick to old ways of doing things just because you’re afraid of change
Even the easiest tools come with a learning curve. But just squeaking by every time is not the same as ensuring success.
Your old email calendar was invented in 1996. We’re a few decades beyond that now. It’s time to embrace change and adapt event scheduling software that allows you to schedule your event staff neatly and with transparency so everyone on your team is on the same page. If you can’t grow beyond the tools of 1996, then you can’t grow your business, either.
Read more about the solution.
How to manage event staff and crew
You’ve successfully recruited, onboarded, and scheduled your AV crew and event staff. Now what?
It’s time to set your production crew up for success.
“[Companies] need to give clear information, easy-to-read schedules, and they need to provide the tools that are necessary to do the job right, not put us in a ‘make it work’ situation – and we see that a lot. And that in turn has an effect on the companies we’d rather work or not work for. If a company doesn’t give you the tools to do a job right, then that’s a big problem,” said one veteran AV tech we spoke with.
That’s how important it is to manage your event staff clearly and proactively. If you don’t, you may drive good production talent and event staff away.
Read all the 7 Deadly Sins of Event Crewing & Staffing
DON’T: Fail to communicate clearly with your crew and staff
Stop spending hours on the phone making sure that everyone is aware of that last-minute change to the start time. By the time you’ve gotten the word out, something changes or the next event rolls around and it’s time to start the communication chaos all over again.
Communicate to your entire crew early and often using a mass communication solution. Your production crew needs crucial information like site maps, directions, and floorplans well ahead of time in order to prepare to do the best job they can.
Learn more about the 7 Deadly Sins of Event Crewing & Staffing – and more importantly, the solutions you can use to remedy them.
