Author:
Mike Santa, CVP
FM Issue:
May/June 2017
I remember exactly where I was when I first watched the video from The Station nightclub fire. I remember feeling sick to my stomach. I remember feeling an overwhelming sorrow for those people trapped inside. I was in shock and disbelief, not realizing that something like that could happen so quickly. Images of crowded bars and nightclubs from my own personal experiences came flooding back into my mind. Did the places I visited in my past have enough emergency exits? Did they have fire protection systems in place? Was I really safe?
This past spring, David Conn wrote a detailed description in The Guardian about the Hillsborough soccer disaster of 1989, a disaster that caused the deaths of 96 fans. The descriptions and images of the tragedy, one that could have been prevented, made me sick to my stomach. I still occasionally get nightmares about the crowd management failures made by the officials running the stadium that day. Some nights I lie awake and examine my own events and the crowd safety procedures we have put into place.
It seems like every week I find incidents in the news to learn from. Some are tragic in nature, such as the Orlando nightclub shooting, the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland, or the Indiana State Fair stage collapse from a few years ago. Others are more procedural, like a bomb threat at a local school or watching a sporting event that had to be evacuated due to weather. As venue managers, most of us search for these types of incidents in the news. We want to learn from them, compare them to similar experiences that we’ve had in the past, and attempt to improve our own venue preparedness. For better or worse, and I would like to say better for the most part, venue managers see the world differently. We walk into rooms and immediately scan them for emergency exits. We position ourselves at restaurants with our backs against the walls, giving ourselves the best option to see the entire room. When we go to venues or airports, we examine the adequacies of security levels that have been put into place. These instincts have been instilled into our brains, and our venues and patrons are safer because of them.
Our compulsion to re-examine our plans and learn from our own and others’ mistakes make our venues better. There are venues all around the world that are filled with venue managers that have this passion. Our industry is filled with people that have these “peculiarities” in our personality that allow us to see the world with a different view. It is great to have people like this working in our venues, but I would argue that our responsibility as venue managers goes one step further.
The next level for venues is to instill the same passion and drive to improve all aspects of our facilities, plans, and culture in our part-time staff as well. It is one thing for our venue to have an operations staff that care about the safety of our building and touring act productions. It is great if our directors of security and guest services understand the elements of crowd movement and energy. However, what about the hundreds of part-time staff that work in our venues? What about the ticket takers, ushers, greeters, security staff, concessionaires, box office clerks, and other part-time staff? These groups are often times on the “front lines,” directly dealing with thousands of patrons that enter our buildings. How do we engage these groups to truly care about the jobs and tasks that we are training them for? How do we turn our part-time venue staff into a team of true venue managers?
The Challenges of a Part-Time Workforce
Most of us in the venue industry encounter the challenges of dealing with a part-time work force. If you’re like me and work at a university or in a college town, you face another set of trials when much of your part-time staff are college students. I truly love my staff (well, most of them) and have a passion for working with students, but even I will admit that there are difficulties from time to time. Sending out schedule reminders, enforcing punctuality, ensuring that staff adhere to dress code policies, reminding staff to stay off cell phones, and the list goes on and on. Many times it seems like I’m more of a parent than an employer. The other challenge that we all deal with is the high rate of turnover that can occur with part-time positions, especially if you happen to work in a university setting. It can be easy to spend all of our time and energy on the basics as we train, teach, and discipline our part-time staff. It can be easy to be satisfied with a staff that meets the minimum requirements, but we owe it to ourselves and our patrons to go beyond that. How do we stimulate our part-time staff to truly care about the finer details of venue management? How do we motivate them to care more about the safety and experience of the patron than they do about the paycheck?
Inspiring our Team—Practical Solutions
In recent years, our team has begun to search for methods to engage and inspire our part-time staff. What we have learned, or maybe rather what has been reinforced in our training philosophy, is that our part-time staff needs constant and varied training over the course of the year. This is obviously nothing groundbreaking, but we realized that our management team has the tendency and desire to keep training consistent. It is much easier for us to look at last year’s training, tweaka few things, and present the same material in the same fashion. This approach allows us to standardize our teaching and requires less work. This method is far from the most effective way from engaging our staff. Yes, some trainings that we offer our part-time staff require proper documentation, and a standardized approach is often best in those scenarios, but we have begun to explore ways in which we can build upon those regulated, unvaried trainings. We have attempted to implement items into our training series that stimulate the minds of our staff and puts them into real world scenarios.
One of the best ways we have found to do this is to bring outside groups in to present topics in their area of specialty. No matter how passionate or knowledgeable I am with a certain topic, a high percentage of my staff will likely tune me out. They hear and see me all the time, but someone new can capture their attention. Last year, we brought in Tier One Tactical Solutions, LLC out of the St. Louis area to provide hands-on training on active shooter scenarios within our venues. The feedback from our staff was overwhelmingly positive. We heard over and over things like “It never occurred to me that something like this could happen in our venue,” and “I had not thought about what I would do in an active shooter scenario.” Despite our best efforts as a management team to include training for active shooter situations both in person and via our employee handbook, many of our staff did not learn until we brought someone else in. It does not have to be some expert in the field that you bring in from out of state. This year we partnered with our local police department to discuss techniques in de-escalation, and we received similar positive feedback from our staff. We are also teaming up with our security company to provide a lesson in “verbal judo” for our staff in the coming months.
We also rely heavily on the resources that IAVM has the ability to provide, both formally through programs and training opportunities, and informally, through conversations with colleagues both in person and through sources like VenueNet. Remember The Station nightclub fire I alluded to earlier? I was first introduced to that video through Trained Crowd Manager, an IAVM online training course. We have since put all of our supervisors through the same training and are looking to implement it more widespread for all of our staff. Table-top, scenario-based discussions are also now part of our regular training techniques. We present various circumstances to our staff in small groups and discuss how we would handle that situation as a team, an idea that was shared with me from a colleague at a recent IAVM conference. The group that provided our hands-on active shooter training? I personally went through the same training at a recent Region 2/3 combined meeting. We liked our experience so much that we figured out a way to bring them in to present to our entire staff. I would love for this article alone to help spark conversations and generate ideas on what other venues are doing along these lines. One of my favorite parts about this industry is everyone’s willingness to share their experiences. Whether formally or informally, IAVM has the resources to help us improve, update, and bolster our training from year to year.
Assessing our Results
So, what have our results been? I will be the first to tell you that we will always be in a “work in progress” mode. The minute we become complacent in our training techniques, we lose the ability to engage our staff. We are constantly looking for ways to add value into our training offerings, but we have begun to see small improvements. Our part-time staff has begun to bring up ideas and questions about how we would handle certain situations. They question some of our plans and procedures, not just to be difficult, but to truly understand how we would handle a situation. I have seen staff members take it upon themselves to move an item out of an emergency stairwell or proactively engage in conversation with two fans that might be on the verge of a heated argument. Our staff feel comfortable to approach us with topics that they would like to see in future trainings.
It is the little things that make a big difference in the end. The little things can help change our culture. The little things can help us shift from caring more about the paycheck and watching the event to investing in the safety and experience of our patrons. The goal is a lofty one, but a necessary one: to transform the mindset of each one of our part-time staff members into the outlook of a professional venue manager.
This past May, we held our annual Spring Commencement event at our 52,000-seat stadium. In addition to the near capacity stadium to manage, our staff helps organize and manage close to 6,000 graduates in a nearby facility. As I watched a team of nearly 30 part-time staff members guide, direct, and communicate to our graduates, I realized that we are well on our way to developing venue managers out of our part-time staff. Each person seemed to recognize the subtleties in crowd energy and dynamics. The corrals used to organize students had been crafted in a way to leave room for emergency exits. It was an incredible sight to see the topics that we had been preaching over the past few years come to fruition. Each part-time staff member involved successfully executed this large-scale event by examining it through the eyes of a venue manager. It is moments like these that we venue professionals realize why we are in the venue management industry in the first place.
Mike Santa, CVP, is general manager of Indiana University Event Services in Bloomington.
