Nigel Bennett, project director at agency Cheerful Twentyfirst, shares tips on looking after your event’s production team.
Not so long ago, the office served as project HQ. We could easily spot if someone was stressed out or having an off day. We’d make them a cuppa, tell them to take a walk around the block and lend a helping hand.
Virtual events operate under similar high stress circumstances, but stress looks different behind a screen. As remote work is mass adopted, it’s important we take steps to extend office culture, recognise when someone needs that cuppa
or ten minutes away from their laptop, and create the space for colleagues to raise their ‘digital
hand’ to ask for help.
We recently delivered a global virtual conference where our team had to be operational and on point for three days straight. After 72 live hours on the front line, here are a ew baseline procedures we implemented to protect our production teams and manage stress effectively.
Resource appropriately, especially across time zones
Working across seven continents was always going to be tricky. The biggest time differences were 19 hours apart, between East Coast Australia and West Coast America. We established regional project leads to work with local clients, meaning someone would always be available on comms.
We built timezone considerations into the schedule. For example, our video team (based in the UK) was working late into the morning to remotely direct a shoot in Singapore. We deliberately allocated a rest day the following day to give the team capacity to sleep, recover and come back bright-eyed and ready to go the following day. These were simple considerations, but highly effective in managing wellness in the lead up to our live days.
Respect working hours and finish times
Our UK delivery team worked in relayed shifts to make sure everyone had allocated breaks and could (at the very least) go offline for their dinner. We established dedicated teams for day and night but with so many complex moving parts, events often ran in parallel or had some overlap. For the onsite team, we made sure everyone was booked into local accommodation to ensure no one was making long drives after the sessions.
Be attentive and aware to safeguard culture
We spoke regularly about things outside of the project, touched base every morning for a team huddle, and made sure the team was always connected via chat or comms channels. Each ‘shift’ had a dedicated runner, ensuring there was plenty of tea, coffee, hot meals and, of course, chocolate. Ultimately, virtual or hybrid events can have a huge impact on the wellness of production teams. The key, in my opinion, is overtly offering support, keeping in regular communication and making conscious efforts to check in with every individual on the team, making every effort to give them a chance to raise their ‘digital hand’.
Now, let’s put that kettle on.
