Managing Staff and Volunteer Fatigue During Multi-day Music Festivals.

Any large multi-day music festival could use hundreds of staff and volunteers to help make events happen. Individuals have a finite level of energy, and these resources should be treated carefully to reduce absences, errors, and to maintain physical and mental health. How should festival organisers plan their staff resources to reduce any occurrences of fatigue.

The adverse implications of having fatigued staff on a festival site can include increased safety risks, poor customer service interactions and operational inefficiency. Organisers must ensure that their planning takes account of the physical and mental limits if individuals. This includes careful duty rotation planning and making allowances for everyone's wellness by providing an environment that encourages rest and recuperation during the event live dates.

Rota and Duty Rotation Planning.
Whilst most full-time permanent staff will have clearly defined task responsibilities with contractual obligations for breaks, the army of volunteers can sometimes be unfairly exploited, exposing them to increased fatigue. A robust planning process should be used to schedule volunteer duties, and an event management software platform like Festival Pro can be an invaluable tool to plan volunteer shift assignment and rotation. A good planning tool can also help with ascertaining how many volunteers will be required for the duties identified, and many organisers recruit 110% of their actual requirement. It is generally accepted that the maximum length of a shift should be no more than 8 hours with mandatory breaks and avoiding late finishes followed by early starts on consecutive days. Every event will have different requirements with some demanding that volunteers do a minimum of two 8-hour shifts over three days, for example. The nature of a shift can also impact how fast fatigue sets especially in high pressure roles like managing crowd control, late night load-ins, and helping medical facilities. Switching volunteers between high stress and low stress duties can help to manage fatigue amongst volunteers.

Fatigue Management Training Programmes.
The staff and supervisors responsible for managing volunteers should undergo training to help them understand and recognise the symptoms of fatigue in the people they manage. A key part of fatigue management is recognising typical symptoms which may include irritability, slow responses, and poor judgement, for example. It is the supervisor's responsibility to rotate volunteers exhibiting fatigue before they ask so they can take appropriate rest and be moved to less stressful duties later during the event.

Dedicated Wellness Zones.
Event organisers should plan their festival site to have dedicated staff and volunteer wellness zones. These should be situated in quiet areas where volunteers can rest or sleep to re-energise. These quiet zones should have shade from the sun, power charging facilities, and hydration stations, for example. For multi-day festivals volunteers should also have a dedicated quiet camping zone. Supervisors should enforce rest windows on volunteers who have just completed an 8-hour shift, if possible.

Food and Beverages for Health and Energy.
A key element to maintaining the energy levels of volunteers and preventing fatigue is ensuring that they are given appropriate food and beverages at regular intervals during the live event dates. Volunteers should always have access to water no matter where they are on a site or what their duty is. It may be advisable to add electrolyte solution availability to hydration stations which can help prevent dehydration in excessively hot weather. Organisers should discuss and plan volunteer meals carefully with suppliers to ensure that balanced meal options are available that include proteins and complex carbs. The catering contractor should also ensure that meals are available throughout the festival's operation with sufficient availability and reduced queuing to prevent volunteers from skipping meals. This needs to be monitored by supervisors to ensure that volunteers are sufficiently fed during their time on site.

Other Factors.
Some festival organisers provide incentives or rewards for volunteers who successfully complete their shift and can show that they have taken the necessary breaks and consumed sufficient food and beverages to re-energise. Organisers can use data that takes into account how many shifts each volunteer completed, how many went over the 8-hour period and how many meals were consumed to get a better understanding of potential increased fatigue levels. Organisers should conduct a post-event review of their volunteer performance to highlight any incidents of fatigue, what caused it, and what improvements can be made for future events.

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 including a dedicated volunteer management module. 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 Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels

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