Good help can be hard to find. But how can you tell if someone is good? Mostly online reviews and rating sites are creating a bridge to ensure freelancers
Be the leader, be the first person that nurtures and gives feedback not only to freelance event staff but also your crew. The reason being is that if you have field, industry and market experience you can provide positive tips, highlight the problem areas and ultimately become a go-to person or staffing agency for future requirements.
That being said, giving feedback is hard. Giving constructive feedback is even harder, especially when you are working on multiple projects or have a number of tasks to complete so the last thing you want to do is observe, make notes, hold meetings and engage in the feedback loop – very time-consuming.
To help take the initial steps to provide feedback to your event staff freelancers and crew, here’s a quick guide to key focus areas which ensures the feedback is valuable and constructive.
Strict Guidelines that Cannot Be Altered
This is looking at you, the agency or event manager who is in charge of recruiting the event staff. You need to have very clear and set in concrete guidelines that the freelancer can review, comment and understand pre-event.
Freelancers need to know exactly what has to be done, how it needs to be done and when. These are guidelines will help the event staff also self-grade their performance based on these expectations.
Imagine being a freelancer who arrives at an event with no clear plan, guidelines or objectives – it’s a dead-end for both of you and ultimately everyone will suffer here.
How can you provide constructive feedback if there is no measurement? The guidelines you provide are essentially the yard-stick that the event staff will need to measure up against which ultimately gives you the ability to then provide solid, performance-based feedback – everyone is happy!
Receive Feedback
You may think your processes have been adapted over the years to work in a flawless manner but having the feedback from a freelancer can sometimes be eye-opening.
One piece of feedback, plus 5 others and you can start building up an understanding of just how well run your staffing agency or event management company may be.
Again the feedback you get from freelancers and crew could be that you lack clear guidelines for events, communication may be an issue – any feedback should be reviewed and understood.
It’s your mission to have a solid event staff crew you can call on, and the event staff crew should have someone that they can call on for advice and ongoing feedback.
Focus on Work & Tone
Never get personal, never provide feedback on something that has nothing to do with the guidelines or work that has been completed.
Again this makes it clear that the guidelines you set need to be clear and unaltered so that the event staff can complete their role and tasks effectively.
Discussing what specific areas can be improved for example pre-event prep or the general approach to attendees and so it will be far more useful to someone when they can also compare this to the guidelines.
If you happen to be giving feedback via email or message format remember that emotion doesn’t read well and certain phrases or sentences may come across in a negative manner. You want to encourage and motivate staff to work with you but also improve each and every time they are staff at an event.
Overview
Feedback is vital for event staff, for you and for your company because it forms the foundations of the culture you wish to present to your clients and staffers.
So it makes sense to have functions and features in place to ensure feedback is delivered and received as well as being able to review all of this at a later date.
One of the key focuses with Liveforce crew management is that crew members can receive reviews and ratings from gigs that they complete – being able to read this publically ensures staff get solid feedback and know how to improve or what they can take away as positive.
Check out the Liveforce promotional & event staff app and it’s features here.
