Tip: At the end of the Weekend, Sunday evening, we started in 2015 to encourage the managers/heads of department to plan a free evening with their regular staff and the YEMPers as a teambuilding activity. This worked very well in 2015, though in 2018 it worked a bit less well with the regular staff being too stressed to take the evening off.

 

Preparing the YEMP tasks

At a management team retreat at the beginning of July 2018 the heads of department and parts of the Steering Committee worked on a first list of possible tasks for YEMpers. The list was updated and changed until the end of the YEMP weekend. At the end of the weekend the YEMPers were distributed to these tasks and informed about them.

• First list with overview on draft -> here
• Final version with YEMPers attributed and distributed to coaches -> here

Training on the job:

The issue of when and how to distribute the YEMPers to different positions in the festival is a crucial and difficult one. The YEMPers would often like to know earlier, which department they would work in during the festival. On the other hand we have realized that we need to see / experience the YEMPers first to be sure we are taking the best decision. We have therefore chosen as method to tell the YEMPers at the end of the training weekend what will be their tasks in the festival team. This means that we can observe them during the sessions, exercises and games of the training weekend and see how they communicate, what is their approach to problem-solving etc.

Tip: For a YEMP at national or local level it may be better to do the training weekend a bit earlier and thus be able to tell them earlier where they will be working.

The first task is to prepare a list of possible positions for YEMPers during the event, and to do this in close cooperation with the local organisers (see above). A careful balance is needed so that the tasks foreseen for YEMPers are not too simple and cannot be done by any volunteer, and that on the other hand they do not feel overstretched or do have too much responsibility. In 2018  we realized that we had a high quality of YEMPers and not enough positions with sufficient responsibility.

Then on the Monday after the training weekend the YEMPers join the corresponding departments and start working for the festival. They will not be able to meet as full group of YEMPers until the evaluation after the festival, but they will meet in small groups regularly.

In the YEMP presentation video we included a little film two YEMPers made with snippets from the preparatory week (go to minute 2 of the video).  You will see some of the YEMPers at work, sorting meal tickets, packing bags, designing the logistics of the check-in day, checking in participants. These were necessary tasks done by most YEMPers independent from their future tasks, they were asked to help where most help was needed, especially during the last days before the start of the festival.