The Importance of Training for Events Teams.

No matter if you are organising small or large events you will have a team to manage and organise. Time invested in training along with having the right processes and procedures in place will help your events run smoothly and more efficiently.

For new starters ensure that they go through an appropriate training process and get commitment to an understanding of what they have been through. If you don’t have them already try building a documented training handbook of processes and procedures within the organisation and store in a convenient online location easily accessible to all team members. It will be helpful to segment this into different aspects of your events business be it Artist Liaison, Vendor and Sponsor management or Marketing for example. If any staff move between disciplines or are asked to help out in an unfamiliar area of the business, they can be referred to documented handbooks. 

Organise training sessions for new starters as soon as they start and don’t skip on this, be as thorough as possible. Don’t leave it there, make sure that all staff have regular training updates so that they constantly learn and evolve with your events business. Build in feedback loops from staff so that the training processes can be improved. Fully understand what you did well and identify any gaps so that you can constantly improve your training processes.  

If you are running large scale music festivals also add into the mix the training of volunteers, this requires a slightly different approach because staff are there because they are volunteers rather than employees that you want to develop over time. 

As with any training there is an element of on-the-job training, there is no substitute for putting theory in practise. Get new staff to be involved on-site as much as possible when you are running events. Having a good training plan can also help to Identify rising stars in your organisation and therefore place them in the most appropriate roles where they will shine. Ensure you assign someone responsible for training, they may not deliver training sessions but should be ensuring that all staff go through the right training and that a calendarised schedule of training has been confirmed.  

Most problems that managers have with staff can be identified as training rather than underperformance issues so understand fully what these are so they can be rectified. Employing people is a costly affair so always give people the benefit of the doubt and explore your own training deficiencies. This is a widely misunderstood area of any business and you could end up losing potentially great team members because of your own poor training. 

If you are using an event management software solution like FestivalPro you will get all the functionality you need to document your training handbooks and calendarised activities for staff. 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. The FestivalPro platform is straightforward to use and includes easy to use and understand training videos so now staff can rapidly get up and running using this software to manage events.

Photo by Belle Co from Pexels

<< Back to articles