If you were planning to get into WE Fest as an employee this year and then ditch to watch the show, think again – Fargo-based software company Clifton Labs has developed a wristband that keeps the festival employees accountable.
Blaine Booher, leader of the WE Fest wristband project and all-around cool guy.
Every year, the massive country music festival WE Fest draws crowds of over 70,000 people, and hires around 1,800 employees just for the event.
And every year, around 20% of those employees decide to grab the employee wristband and ditch their duties for a little Blake Shelton, or Jake Owen, etc. Over three hundred people were being lost each year.
“The challenge is that employees don’t show up for the work,” said Blaine Booher, founder of Clifton Labs and leader of the WE Fest wristband project. “They come in and get their tickets for the show and then they don’t show up for work.”
The Accountability Wristband
The slacker-employee phenomenon was getting so bad that it prompted Bob Bliss, Director and General Manager of WE Fest, to seek out a solution.
“We wanted to develop a program that would, number one, monitor our employees in making sure they were fulfilling their obligation to earn the free admission to our event, and secondly to ultimately be able to even automate everything from checking in, to time cards,” Bliss said.
Booher said WE Fest contacted Clifton Labs because of a strong relationship with Clifton Labs’ sister company, Knight Printing, who has been doing printing for WE Fest tickets and item promotion for many years. When WE Fest approached him with the challenge last year, Booher said he was immediately excited for the job.
Working with a small team, he designed a wristband that can track in real-time, and can be disabled from the Web if that employee has not shown up for their shift. This way, if an employee is playing hookie and gets their wristband scanned at the entry to the concert, it will blink red instead of green. BUSTED.
“I actually had to work this year.”
The wristbands made their debut at last year’s WE Fest and were very successful, Booher said. The number of employees who skipped work dropped from 20% to 4%, with many of those cases being those who left early due to medical emergencies.
“They saw a drastic improvement with people showing up for their shifts, with that extra layer of accountability,” Booher said.
Bliss agreed, saying that the number of lost employees “definitely went down.”
“Everyone knows they are being tracked, so it’s a great tool for what we wanted to do,” he said.
Bustin’ the slackers, one wristband at a time.
The introduction of these new, smart wristbands definitely caught the employees off guard, Booher said. He described how it was almost comical watching the interface and seeing how many employees tried to get into the concert, only to have their wristbands deny them entry. Sometimes, he said, he’d watch an employee get denied at one point of entry, and then try every other point of entry and get repeatedly denied.
“Some friends overheard employees saying, ‘I went to WE Fest and I actually had to work this year!'” Booher said with a laugh.
The Accountability Wristband 2.0
For WE Fest 2015, Booher and his team made a few improvements to the wristband such as adjusting the size, and ensuring the fabric of the band won’t affect any skin allergies (little things you might not think of, until your product is worn by 1,800 people, he said.)
Allergy-testing the wristband.
Most of the wristband, including the scanner and a circuit board that solders all the components together, is built here in Fargo, he said.
They’re also working on more long-term improvements as well, such as adding a mobile app that could display information on each employee when their wristband is scanned.
“So if you find a person that needs medical assistance, you could scan their wristband and get their info,” Booher said.
Another potential feature is wristbands that give certain people access to special zones, such as backstage wristband, or a VIP wristband, etc.
Today WE Fest….Tomorrow, Coachella?
The design of the wristband has potential for other music festivals too, Booher said. So far, he said, there aren’t many wristbands that have the same ability to track employees in real-time and monitor their individual wristband.
“The space is pretty competitive, but it’s not saturated,” he said. “The goal would be to work with other groups and start marketing this to a wide variety of festivals that might be interested.”
Festivals like Coachella or Electric Daisy Carnival draw crowds of 90-130,000 people every year. A wristband like this one could definitely make their process more streamlined, Booher said.
No slacker-employees here, thank you very much.
Next week, a few days before WE Fest is held from August 6 – 8, Booher will drive to the festival grounds in Detroit Lakes and do wristband training. He may even check out some of the concerts, he said.
Obviously after making sure he’s got the right wristband.
Photos courtesy of Pixabay and Marisa Jackels.
