Despite intense workload and more than 130.000 people in attendance, Roskilde Festival improved communication throughout the entire week.

This year, tabsurvey attended Roskilde Festival and had a blast. We got a close look at how the machine behind the great festival operates and were purview to the new structure at Roskilde Festival that is developing. Roskilde Festival used tabsurvey to look at the internal relations amongst the different stakeholders. This was done to focus on improved communication and teamwork amongst the different groups operating within Roskilde Festival.

As the second largest festival in Europe, Roskilde Festival is visited by roughly 130.000 happy festivalgoers for one intense decadence week. Each year Roskilde introduces an amazing line-up – a mix of up-and-coming as well as world-renowned artists. Overseeing this massive monster of a party are 30.000 individuals all wearing the Roskilde banner to ensure a safe and energetic atmosphere while catering to the needs of festivalgoers. A vast undertaking that requires serious administration and planning prior to and especially during the festival.

How do Roskilde manage this, year after year, with such success?

One answer is that they have great staff that each year come together working towards another great festival.

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
– Jim Collins; Good to Great

Last year Roskilde introduced a new structure with the addition of the Safety Manager role. Safety Managers are responsible for collaboration across some of the groups that are necessary for a great Roskilde. Some of the areas include security, samaritans and emergency.

This year, organizers decided to measure how the relationship between the groups and safety manager were functioning. The purpose of the initiative was to improve this year’s festival and towards making future Roskilde festivals even better.

How did Roskilde use tabsurvey?

An important element of the evaluation was collecting input from Safety Managers towards identifying issues from all the work shifts. Each day, administration followed up on the input from the managers to understand the issues.

While this was crucial for negating issues, the Roskilde team was also able to discuss the duties of Safety Managers with the employees. It also set a focus on the importance of good communications with the different groups and highlighted the need for cooperating with these.

Another area Roskilde Festival focused on was locating where they could improve with coordination and ensure better cooperation. Roskilde had each manager give ratings from 1 – 5 for each shift. Tabsurvey analysed the data from each day and used it to start a discussion with managers before each coming shift.

The Roskilde team segmented the data into areas, namely West, East and Center. They did this to locate if certain areas were more exposed to better conditions that enabled better workflow. Another filter was the shift time (morning, afternoon or night) to see if certain time periods had a) differing needs b) exposed to more pressure c) cooperation was better/worse.

Results

As a result of actively working with relations, Roskilde Festival saw a positive curve over the entire week. Near the end, they had improved communication by working out the issues. Even when the music started (Wednesday) the Team saw a positive growth in their score. This was in spite of the large increase in workload that came with opening the inner area.

Lastly, Roskilde Festival use the collected data to generate insights for future festivals and have planned a workshop for discussing how they should handle next years’ cooperation. They did not just use the data to test and validate the function of safety managers, but also as a means to build upon the current support structure.

Summary

This year, Roskilde Festival started the evaluation as a test to measure the cooperation from one side – namely the safety managers. From next year onwards, Roskilde will presumably instigate this initiative across several groups to streamline expectations and ensure improved communication while strengthening communications.

We are very excited to see how Roskilde will improve and the developments that are taking place within Roskilde Festival.