How to Evaluate Your Event Team: An 11-Step Guide to Team Performance

Unless you’re an octopus, you’ll need an extra pair of hands to help you organise a successful event. A good event
team is an invaluable asset to you as an event planner.

But how do you know how well your team is doing? By working out a way to evaluate their performance, so you know
what works and what doesn’t.

Read on to learn about how to define success criteria for your event and measure your team’s performance against
them.

1. Define the criteria for event team success

Before you can evaluate your team—or your event as a whole for that matter—you need to define your success
criteria. Otherwise, you have nothing to measure your performance against.

Your success criteria could be:

 Tickets sold
 Funds raised
 Social media engagements
 Event survey feedback
 Team evaluation forms

Whatever criteria you decide on, make sure that you use it to establish a clear baseline. That way, both you and your
team know what’s expected.

2. Use KPIs for your event team

If you’re organising a major event that involves a proportionally large staff, you might want to consider using KPIs (key
performance indicators) to evaluate your team members.

Team member KPIs can help you…

 Find out who does the most (and least) amount of work
 Understand which tasks members find challenging
 Create transparency on the event team
 Increase everyone’s overall productivity
 Some managers consider team member metrics a waste of time, while others swear by them. It depends on your
approach to managing your event team.

How to evaluate your event team: Use KPIs to quantify performance.

Use KPIs to quantify performance.

Here are some of the metrics you can use to evaluate your event team:
 Attendance (late showers, early leavers, and sick days)
 Helpfulness (which members are seen by others as the most helpful)
 Efficiency (how fast are they at their tasks)
 Initiative (how often do members take ownership and contribute with ideas)
 Quality (how well do members execute their tasks)

When you evaluate each team member’s performance, remember to look out for any positive or negative outliers.

Positive outliers indicate that the team member is doing something extraordinary that the rest of the team could
benefit from doing, too.

Conversely, negative outliers indicate that an individual team member is struggling. That lowers productivity for that
member at best, and makes the whole team less effective at worst.

Tip: Use this resource to help you work out your event team KPIs.

3. Note down observations during the event

You should make observations on what happens during the event. It will undoubtedly be a busy day, so it can be
helpful to actually write down what you observe.

Once the dust has settled, you can review the notes. They will be an excellent qualitative addition to the numbers you
use to measure the event’s success.

4. Ask for feedback from the guests on the day

You can also supplement your evaluation data with feedback on the day. It can’t hurt to ask your guests if they feel
they’ve been taken care of by your team.

In fact, you can encourage guests to review the event online and mention exceptional team members by name.

5. Ask guests in post-event surveys

A post-event survey is an excellent tool to help you improve future events. You can use it to gauge what the guests
thought about the venue, the entertainment, the food, and your team.

How to evaluate your event team: Use post-event surveys to measure team performance.

Use post-event surveys to measure team performance.

You can include open-ended and multiple-choice questions about your team’s performance in your post-event survey.

Tip: Read our guide on free event survey tools you can use to collect feedback.

6. Measure online data

If your team is helping you out with email campaigns and social media promotion, you can also use the success of
those initiatives to measure the team’s performance.

For instance, if a team member is tasked with responding to followers on social media, you can tally up the number of
responses they’ve written to potential guests.
Tip: Read about what numbers to look for when you measure your online promotion success.

7. Debrief the team after the event

It’s good practice to hold a debrief meeting with your team after the event. It will give you an opportunity to revisit the
goals for the event and see if you achieved them.

It will also allow you to address any critical challenges as a group. Use the debriefing to brainstorm any potential
solutions to the difficulties you’ve experienced before and during the event.

Tip: Read about how to debrief your event team after the event.

8. Speak to each member individually

Not everyone is comfortable speaking in front of a group, particularly if it concerns personal issues or criticism of other
team members.

How to evaluate your event team: Interview each team member individually if possible.

Interview each team member individually, if possible.

If you’re organising a smaller event, you should consider debriefing each team member individually. It will give you
much more insight into how they perceived the event.

Tip: Use these sample questions to ask during a performance review for inspiration.

9. Assess your level of involvement

As the event organiser and team manager, it’s crucial that you evaluate your own performance. You’re the captain of
the ship. Without you, it will sink.

There are many ways to fail as a manager, even when you have the best intentions.

One of them is to get so involved in granular tasks that you lose sight of the big picture. Conversely, you can also be so
detached from your team that you become inaccessible.

Take some time to reflect on your own involvement in the team. And don’t be afraid to ask your team to give you
feedback on your performance as the event manager.

Tip: Read about how to evaluate yourself as a leader.

10. Consider external factors

When you assess your event team, you should also factor in all the things that are outside of your team’s control.

You can measure how well your team does at promoting your event online, but you can’t predict the impact of
competing events being marketed at the same time.
On a similar note, you can measure how well your team serves the guests at an outdoor event, but you can’t predict
sudden weather changes that affect their job.

11. Analyse everything

Once you’ve looked at all the numbers, debriefed the team, and gathered feedback from the attendees, it’s time to
add it all together.

By now you should have the following ways to evaluate your team’s performance:

Success criteria for the event

 Event team KPIs

 Personal observations during the event
 On-site feedback from the attendees
 Post-event survey results
 Online data
 Suggestions from team debriefing
 Input from individual team member interviews
 Feedback on your role as an event manager
 Any external factors outside of your control

It’s up to you whether to go for qualitative or quantitative data when evaluating your team’s performance. If you’re in
doubt, use a mix of both to get a more detailed picture.

Plan the next event

Now that you’ve evaluated your event team’s performance, it’s time to plan the next event. Hopefully, you’ll have a
lot of valuable new insights that can help you improve.