Moving to Continuous Micro-Onboarding for Music Festival Staff and Volunteers.

Most music festival entities are facing rising labour and infrastructure costs to make their events happen. Can moving to continuous micro-onboarding for staff and volunteers help to reduce labour costs and overcome a shortage of specialist workers. What steps do organisers need to consider in moving their staffing to a continuous micro-onboarding model.

Every business uses some form of onboarding to get new recruits up to speed and work effectively as fast as possible. Traditionally, during the onboarding process new recruits are not productive and even after onboarding can take some time to get up to speed. The music festival environment has some specific challenges because entities usually only retain a small team of full-time permanent staff and rely heavily on contractors and volunteers during busy periods. For these reasons festivals need to increase workforce agility and rapid communication to make them more operationally efficient. Continuous micro-onboarding ensures that there is no informational overload, but that key processes and procedures are communicated in a timely manner.

Festival Workforce Structures.
The cost of employing people is always a significant cost for operating a music festival and the industry is known for poor pay and long hours but as the availability of experienced specialists reduces the pay demands can exceed budgets. More organisers are getting their existing staff cross trained in other aspects key to the operation of the entity; this reduces exposure should an experienced staff member leave. Building a list of regular reliable contractors helps to reduce experience shortages as they can be called in at short notice and do not require any comprehensive onboarding. The recruitment, training and retention of volunteers is changing with smart onboarding and intelligent shift allocation to reduce churn during live event dates.

Staffing Challenges.
A typical festival workforce is evolving with an increase in temporary, multilingual individuals who are more technology dependent than ever. There is increasing pressure on staff to consider safety compliance, environmental compliance, fatigue management, and an awareness of cybersecurity threats. This requires a high level of adaptability, and continuous micro-onboarding can help manage these pressures. Organisers are relying heavily on specialist contractors, freelancers and agency workers who in some instances may only work for a single day or one production phase, for example. Full time staff and volunteer workforces working for festival entities can have high turnover due to fatigue, illness, and travel issues. This high churn combined with operational complexities makes micro-continuous onboarding a key part of communicating key operational updates. Any use of continuous micro-onboarding requires reliable digital access that is privacy compliant without generating too much information which can overload individuals with excessive data.

What is Continuous Micro-Onboarding.
Continuous micro-onboarding is a workforce management approach where festival staff, contractors, volunteers, vendors, and temporary workers receive short, targeted onboarding modules throughout the event lifecycle instead of relying only on one large pre-event induction. This works because workforces can have high turnovers with a high number of temporary workers (contractors and volunteers). Short digital learning combined with role specific updates can help focus on learning. Key safety messages can be repeated in short formats to help with continuous learning and avoid overloading staff with long training sessions where information is rarely retained.

Volunteers.
Some large-scale music festivals recruit hundreds of volunteers every year, and it can be costly and time-consuming to organise group training sessions, some lasting a day or more. The use of micro learning platforms helps complete brief training modules without the need for a physical presence. Learning can be delivered through mobiles devices and is intended to be continuous with safety updates and relevant reminders about specific shift duties and responsibilities. This way volunteers receive only relevant information that is pertinent to their assigned role.

Technology Enablers.
Most continuous micro-onboarding is delivered electronically through mobile devices, so staff and volunteers do not need to attend physical training sessions. The content can be designed to be a series of short training videos and emergency checklists with digital acknowledgements built in. Some organisers also provide access to key information using QR Codes situated in staff only zones that can provide location specific troubleshooting information and key checklists relevant to their duty. Some systems are moving toward smart wearables which can also be linked to access control, location, fatigue monitoring and emergency messaging producing a workforce credential ecosystem.

For festival organisers planning their next event using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their event logistics. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors, guestlists, ticketing, site planning, cashless payments and contactless ordering.

Image by Vladislav Anchuk via Pexels

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