Innovators in Team Building

We saved time in our business with an innovative new solution – could you?

As a business that believes in the principles of Kaizen (activity that involve all employees in the continuous improvement of all functions) we recently challenged ourselves around the topic of staffing our events.

Having run thousands of events over the last 20 years, we’ve booked over 25,000 freelance staffing days. As a business owner, I’m always on the lookout for the very highest calibre of freelancers to help the onsite delivery of our events. Getting this right is not be underestimated and for an SME, it represents a significant ongoing investment of time.

We recently asked ourselves the question of how we can make it a more time efficient activity, whilst maintaining, or better still, improving the quality of staff representing our brand on our events.

We set the challenge to Leila in our project management team. Over the course of a few months, Leila investigated several apps that promised to fulfil our needs. Leila spoke to other contacts and companies to ask how they approach freelance staffing. She also consulted our freelance team to ensure that any system we put into place would be intuitive and beneficial for all involved.

To help us compile a shortlist, we looked at the same things that we as a company focus on when continually developing and innovating in the team building market. We wanted…

• …an app that was constantly evolving with continuous investment for improvements
• …a partner who listened to what we want and would build in features we wanted
• …an interface that was easy to use for all involved at both ends of the supply chain
• …a system that is stylish and well presented to create a great user experience
• …a support team who would respond immediately to requests and who you could speak to straight away if you need it…that are at the end of a phone when we need them
• …a process that makes finding the right people in the right places easy for new people in our business, so we don’t rely on institutional memory
• …one system to handle payment reports, recruiting and be a time saving tool for all sides

A side benefit of the process was a spring clean of our database of freelancers making it easier to see who is still available in the market.

From the shortlist, a frontrunner soon appeared. It was called LiveForce.

Founded by Greg Lusk at the start of 2019, LiveForce already has 60 clients and is growing quickly. Interestingly, clients are from a range of different industries from Healthcare, to construction, corporate events and more. Regardless of the industry or sector, organising staff has the same general requirements. There are already over 25,000 freelancers on the database.

We quickly felt LiveForce was the right fit for us and we signed up. We’ve been using the App for a while now and are very positive about how it works for us. Simply put, it’s a really, really, really good system. It’s ticked all the boxes we were looking for an allows us more time to focus on innovating solutions for our customers.

As evidence of the system working for all sides of the party, one of our freelancers, Bob Visser, recently commented, ‘I’ve found the new system much more helpful for me to organise my time. No more trawling back through countless emails to work out what jobs I’m on and where. With the new system, it’s all right there at a click of a button on my phone’.

We’ve found LiveForce a forward-thinking company and hope that one day our freelancers will have an opportunity to find work from other companies via the app and vice versa. As our own co-founder and Creative Director Neil Harvey says, ‘working for other companies in the industry ensures that freelancers are kept busy enough that they don’t feel the need to go and find a proper job!’ This is a vision shared by LiveForce founder Lusk.

About the Author;

Ben Parkinson has been helping companies deliver their corporate messages through unique and innovative experiences for over 20 years. As a co-founder of Blue Hat Teambuilding, his company has been recognised over 40 times by the main industry awards bodies, with 1 million people in over 50 countries having experienced a Blue Hat team event, giving an average rating of 97%.