One of the most time-consuming responsibilities of an event professional is staff scheduling.
Every occasion needs the right people in the right roles so you can create a great experience for everyone involved. Unfortunately, it comes with a number of major challenges.
Here are just 5 to start.
Many companies don't need a team of full-time staff.
Instead, they schedule from a pool of part time people to cover the hours of each event.
This is an effective strategy for financial reasons, but it means you have to spend time figuring out who is available before you book anyone.
Plus you run the risk of someone double-booking and having to cancel on you last minute.
When your team works the same kinds of hours each week, such as every Saturday 9am-5pm, you can rely on consistency to help get the work done.
You're used to the process and your team has an idea of what to expect. However, when no day is guaranteed to look like another, it's like starting over with each event.
In a perfect world, your staff would return your calls and emails with a firm answer on the same day you asked.
However, we're all far from perfect and often have to waste time chasing after non and slow responders, trying to get some kind of answer. This work alone can take a huge amount of time and energy and cause countless amounts of unnecessary stress.
In today's world, you probably receive dozens, if not hundreds, of emails a day.
Add phone calls, text messages and regular mail to the mix, and you have a lot of information to process and remember from moment to moment.
Your staff have the same problem, so when event details are sent through multiple avenues that are quickly buried under new messages, they run the risk of missing something important or forgetting it altogether.
Trying to combine multiple tools that aren't designed for staff scheduling works for a small list of events, but it doesn't scale as your team and business needs grow.
The more pieces you need to juggle, the more time you waste and mistakes you're at risk of making.
As you can see, and have likely experienced, we event professionals have a problem.
Thankfully in our technology-rich world, it has become both easy and cost effective to use staff scheduling software like Quickstaff that brings clarity and control back to the process.
Here are several of the benefits you can expect to experience:
Plus, it lets your staff:
Software systems that organize and automate your staff scheduling are hard to beat.
Some people prefer the old fashioned way of making dozens of phone calls and sending countless emails and text messages to their staff, while tracking it all on paper or digital spreadsheets.
However, if staff scheduling is stealing from the time you need for important growth activities, then give yourself a break and choose a more efficient way.
Want to overcome these five frustrating challenges with the best event staff scheduling software there is?
Quickstaff has helped caterers and event vendors schedule their staff for over 20,000 events since 2013.
Get started with a free 14-day trial! No credit card required, cancel anytime.
