Navigating the Challenges of Staffing for Events

Sports matches, concerts, festivals and demonstrations all share one major logistical hurdle: ensuring you have the right people on the ground. Staffing in the events sector is inherently complicated. Employees are often part-time, their availability fluctuates, and the sheer volume of roles you need to fill can be overwhelming.

Unlike standard service delivery contracts, events are intermittent. A football match might happen once a fortnight, while a conference centre experiences constant downtime between different artists or exhibitions. Consequently, security and cleaning firms must draw from a massive pool of potential workers to satisfy required manning levels.

How do you identify the people who actually want to work? How do you confirm attendance, maintain compliance and calculate complex payroll variables? We explore the unique nuances of this sector and how a workforce management solution can help streamline operations for your security or cleaning teams.

Why Finding Staff Can Feel Impossible

You will inevitably need a large pool of potential staff to call upon. Because many event workers are not full-time employees, they might have other jobs, study commitments or simply pick and choose their shifts. This requires you to advertise, hire and onboard new recruits rapidly.

Using an applicant tracking and onboarding solution accelerates this process. Once integrated with your workforce management solution, your new recruits are efficiently added to your available deployment pool. However, having a large pool is only half the battle. You still need to confirm adequate resources for each specific event.

Instead of labouring over manual phone calls or emails to hundreds of people, automation provides a clear path forward.

Engage Your Workforce With Smart Automation

Engagement features allow you to advertise upcoming events across your entire staff pool. You can target this outreach to ensure delivery to those who live within a specific radius, possess the necessary qualifications or meet other specific criteria.

Opportunities can be broadcast directly via SMS, email or a web-page news article on the employee portal. Interested employees then use their app to search for work and request the roles they want.

All interested candidates appear on a bulk scheduling screen, allowing your schedulers to allocate them quickly to the appropriate team and role. If you need to be proactive, the software can search your worker pool and return a list of eligible candidates based on travel distance, availability and pay levels. You can then send an SMS offering the role, and they simply reply ‘YES’ to confirm.

Planning for High-Volume Deployments

Keeping track of unassigned roles is a major headache when you need a massive workforce. If your plan requires 100 staff, monitoring what is still needed demands precision.
Workforce management solutions now offer specific user interfaces for events to streamline planning. You can build a plan outlining the exact numbers of each staff type required. For example, a stadium area might require ten supervisors, 50 crowd control officers and four baristas. The system shows you instantly how many of each role remain open.

Event plans can be prepopulated from templates you define. You might create a template for every home game of a football season, making repeatable events effortless. The solution keeps the tally updated in real-time as you fill those essential roles.

Prioritising Preferred Teams and Managing Attendance

Given the transient nature of event workers, you will likely prefer to redeploy individuals who already know the venue layout, safety procedures and management team. Your scheduling templates can include a preferred team list. Those employees are automatically assigned during the planning phase, provided they meet all validating criteria. Once allocated, they receive an automated SMS or email notification, followed by a reminder nearer the time.

Even with flawless planning, confirming that everyone has arrived on site is a substantial challenge. Events often span multiple locations within a vast venue. Workforce management solutions offer multiple time and attendance options, including biometric devices, a GPS-based mobile app or a supervisor-led online clock-in system. You can even use a smartphone to scan NFC-based ID cards as regular workers arrive.

These attendance records update instantaneously. If you are staffing a racecourse with personnel dotted around every entrance, the software records their exact arrival time. You can configure alerts to notify you if an individual is missing or if minimal staffing levels are not met.

Ensuring Strict Compliance

Legislative and contractual compliance is non-negotiable for security and cleaning firms in the UK and Ireland. Workforce management solutions prevent the scheduling of staff who have not had sufficient rest, have worked too many hours or lack the required licenses.

Beyond standard regulations, you can apply custom requirements based on a role or location. You might need a certain number of shifts staffed by female operatives to support security pat-down procedures, or you may require staff with specific language skills in high-traffic tourist areas. The software handles these complex variables automatically.

Simplifying Payroll and Holiday Entitlement

Financial calculations are notoriously tricky in the events sector. The same person might work different roles on different days at entirely different events. They might earn varying rates of pay, secure additional bonuses or receive enhancements for unsociable hours.

Modern workforce management solutions allow you to define these parameters comprehensively. Once attendance is recorded, the system automatically applies the correct rules and calculates gross pay.

Managing holiday entitlement for a workforce with varying hours is equally demanding. The solution can automate the calculation of accrued entitlement and its financial value by assessing the average number of hours and pay rate after every completed shift. For non-contracted staff, holiday pay can automatically be applied as a shift uplift, separating it from basic pay for your accounting purposes.

Supporting the Modern Multi-Employed Worker

Temporary event staff often take work with multiple employers. Because workforce management solutions are widely adopted across the support services sector, your staff might already use similar platforms with other companies.

Employees can use these apps to review and request shifts across different employers without needing to reinstall the application. They simply select the employer they want to view, granting them access to news, allocated shifts, joining instructions and pay calculations.

Frequently Asked Questions About Event Staffing

How do we handle the unpredictability of event schedules?

By maintaining a large pool of vetted workers and using automated engagement tools, you can rapidly fill roles as event schedules change or new contracts are won.

Does the software integrate with our existing recruitment process?

Yes. Applicant tracking and onboarding solutions can integrate directly with your workforce management platform, ensuring new hires are immediately available for shift allocation.

How do we pay for software when our staff numbers fluctuate wildly?

Traditional licensing charges are often based on total managed employees, which makes sense for stable operational workloads. However, for event staffing, a much larger pool of employees is required compared to the number actively working. Flexible commercial arrangements and alternative pricing models are available and can be tailored to the specific flexibility required when staffing events.

Enhance Your Event Operations

Managing a vast, transient workforce does not have to be an administrative nightmare. By embracing advanced workforce management technology—such as automation, compliance monitoring, and integrated payroll tools—you can improve efficiency and deliver exceptional service at events.

If you provide services to the events sector, TEAM Software by WorkWave offers a range of tools and solutions designed to support your unique staffing challenges. Reach out to us to discover how your operation could benefit from adopting these approaches, and let’s discuss ways to elevate your workforce management for upcoming events.