Ok we are all suffering. We are coming back, but it is tough and it's different.
It has been said that the pandemic has forwarded us by ten years, that we have been forced to make changes that prevarication and negative approaches would have taken years to produce.
Working from home is the most obvious example, the use of Zoom, Slack, Teams etc. has made us all think of new and more imaginative and resourceful ways of making our industry more streamlined.
If working in an office is your choice, then taped-off desks, queuing for the lift, one-way corridors, temperature checks, staggered start times, and hand sanitising stations are just some of the ways the workplace has changed for the foreseeable future.
My personal involvement in the events industry has been with what has been referred to as the bottom feeders – the supply of crew that do the heavy lifting. Something that cannot be done remotely, but undoubtedly there are operational aspects of the current nose-to-tail crewing service that need imaginative attention and overhaul.
Extreme change must be met with extreme adaptability. We all need to be operating in a vastly different world, and crewing companies need to accept that maybe we have not looked carefully enough at certain ways the world outside our industry has been developing.
Whilst understanding the complicated nature of major events, it has always amazed me that in so many day to day instances the selection of crew has been a last-minute decision often based on cost alone for occasions that have been in the planning for months and months.
The unwieldy process of quoting and negotiating with several of the 30+ crewing companies, all currently shadows of their former selves, is clumsy and outdated in this digital age. Each has their own ‘unique booking system’, which to be honest all do the same thing with tweaks and add-ons that are so often frankly cosmetic. As one major client said to me some time back ‘I just want people that can do the job with the right attitude, in the right place at the right time.’
In the same way that estate agents, insurance companies and many other industries offer a portal that accesses many offerings, surely in this day and age we can all work with one piece of technology that accesses multiple availability. Something that integrates everything from instant appointment of pre-rated workers to signing of timesheets - giving client satisfaction and allowing workers to get paid within hours.
Well we think so.
That's why we've used some of the downtime graced to us by Covid to seek out a scheduling platform that would bring us closer to this dystopian crewing future.
Cue Sinch, a powerful Czech-based all-in-one tool for project and staff management.
Sinch is helping us become more efficient in the scheduling and booking of crew. Give us a shout if you'd like a walkthrough of how it works.
