FoH are Key to the New Normal

As museums plan to reopen and governments in the four nations start to outline what the return to work will look like. It is becoming apparent that FoH will be fundamental to our museums future successes. Across the sector from the smallest museum to the largest FoH will vital to museums safely reopening, building public confidence and starting the road to rebuilding the sector. We will need FoH more than ever before, but we may need more FoH than ever before, to help reopen and keep our museums safe.

The Closed Museum

The museum may be closed but the museum still needs to be cared for, toilets need flushing, maintenance needs to continue, and the collections they hold must be kept safe. This is just the tip of iceberg. Museum workers throughout lockdown have continued to keep museums going, making sure that when the museum can reopen, the museum will be ready too.

As we edge towards operations teams across the country are also busy, preparing new plans, seeing how their museums can adapt to the new normal and the reopening of the museum, whilst ensuring staff and public safety.

A New Normal: Preparing to Reopen the Museum

The visitor experience will change, museums when they reopen will look different. This will be the new normal. FoH will be essential to its successful implementation. Before museums reopen the experiences of FoH from outside the sector, reopening museums and our own workforce will be vital. Any plan to reopen the museum must build on the knowledge of their FoH team. Who else has the knowledge of the bottlenecks across the museum, the ability to manage ques whilst creating excellent visitor experiences or how often the toilets will now need to be cleaned, what equipment the museum will need to keep staff and the public safe. Every museum has a rich bank of knowledge in their FoH teams. Many will be currently furloughed, it is also inevitable that organisations are considering or planning cuts, which will undoubtedly affect FoH. But every organisation will need a full strength FoH team. You will need to bring back FoH before the museum reopens, to contribute to plans, build up their own confidence that their place of work is safe, adapt their practices to the new normal and ultimately be ready to reopen. This preparation will get the most out of FoH and prepare the museum to reopen. If FoH are not ready, you cannot open the museum safely.

A New Normal: Visitor Confidence

We are getting a sense of what this new normal will look like. This is thanks to museums from across the globe as they reopen, sharing what they are doing. Museum and gallery capacity have been slashed, pre-booking is growing and social distancing is universal. Changes are expected from the visitor too, a move to pre-booking for many visitors is an uncomfortable thought. The visitor experience will become intrusive, some are taking temperatures and taking health information, others are taking contact details to allow contact with visitors if they may have been exposed to Coivd-19. These steps will challenge the visitor experience. FoH will be essential to implementing changes across the public sphere and once implemented they will “sell” these changes to the public. This is the realm of FoH, trained to provide excellent visitor experiences, they have to be at the core of museums efforts to welcome visitors back, and ensure the new measures put in place by the museum are being maintained.  The visitor experience and welcome back starts at home, browsing social media and the museums website, communication starts here building visitor confidence about their visit and clearly outlining what the new normal visitor experience is like. This will continue throughout the experience, from queuing at the entrance, the verbal communication with staff explaining the measures in place and expectation on visitors during their visit. FoH will be essential to ensuring the museums measures are maintained and visitor confidence is established.

Throughout the visitor experience as museums embark on the rebuilding process, FoH will be fundamental to communicating changes to museum practices whilst restabilising visitor confidence and ensuring their safety alongside their own and their colleagues.

The New Normal: A Need for More FoH

Museums will look different; the visitor experience has changed, and there will be new expectations on FoH. At this time FoH are the key to successfully reopening museums, establishing visitor confidence and beginning the rebuilding process. They will be more important than ever before.

As museums plan to reopen, we must get across the message that front facing museum workers are vital to the reopening of our museums. Although visitor numbers will drop, we will need more front facing museum workers. We have seen this elsewhere, as in supermarkets where 30,000 workers were recruited to respond to the initial pressure, and now the changes in visitor behaviour moving to weekly shops (less visits) and introduction of social distancing. It is not unreasonable to think we will need more front facing workers. Museums face unprecedented challenges to reopen, some will be facing the loss of volunteers, others will need more workers to manage new queuing and one-way systems. Past the logistical demands, visitors will expect to see FoH. At this time an enhanced presence will contribute to building visitor confidence and ensure the social distancing measures visitors expect to see are being maintained. Part of this is seeing people working to manage the museum, clear guidance coming from a person is more human and contains more gravity than a sign or recording on a loop. It will show to the visitor the museum has responded and that this place is safe place to be in.

Behind the scenes away from the public gaze operation teams need to the support to carry out enhanced cleaning routines and support for the changes museums will make to be to reopen to the public. These changes will affect staff capacity as will the continued need to self-isolate for two weeks when symptoms of Covid-19 appear. We must be honest about it, any support such as funding to reopen museums must also be able to recognise the need for more front facing staff at this time and factor these needs into supporting museums to reopen.

Value FoH

As we emerge into a world where the normal has changed beyond recognition, the museum sector must recognise the increased importance of FoH at this time, to reopen museums, establish visitor confidence and begin the rebuilding of the museum sector, front of house will be crucial.

FoHMuseums: A Step to Somewhere else or a Career in FoH?

You will find FoH in almost every museum, working in roles such as visitor services, operations, in the shop, in the café, and performing tours. They are the human face of the museum, they help humanise collections. For many people including myself they are the first job in a museum you will have. People will experience FoH at the start of their careers in many possible ways such as an apprentice, a seasonal employee working during university or your first full/part time job in a museum. FoHMuseums. These experiences in FoH will profoundly influence your view on museums and build up your skills and CV preparing you for a career in museums. I think anyone wanting to work in the museum sector could benefit immensely from working FoHMuseums at some point in their careers. FoHMuseums should not only be seen as a stepping stone, but a career in itself, a professional set of skills for a museum professional working FoHMuseums. This blog is about why we should all work FoH at some point in our careers and why you should consider it as a career itself.

Skills for a Career in Museums

The museum sector is so competitive many of us end up applying for any opportunity to work in museums, you need all the skills you can muster, and many of them are not museum specific, some will dive out of the sector and back in with new skills, but many of the skills can also be picked up in the museum sector.

FoH is a rich source of skills, which are diverse and help personal development. You will have opportunities to learn about engagement from welcoming people to the museum, to leading teaching sessions and performing guided tours you will learn what methods work what does not and build your skills of engagement a tool anyone working in museums need. There are many practical skills such as operating a till system, booking groups, managing visitor flow, managing people, health and safety awareness and becoming a trained first aider, to name a few. Beyond these traditional skills of FoH specific roles will provide more skills such as public speaking training to lead tours, retail skills in the shop and ticket point or the immense knowledge of the workings of your site in operations, each area of FoH as valuable skills for you learn and add to growing repertoire.

If we go beyond skills and look at the theory of museum, museology, FoHMuseums is where theory is often most visible, such as in the use of handling collections, and visitor policies. You will be in environment of many museum professionals often with many in a similar position to yourself, FoH becomes a centre of discussion of museum ideology an exchange of ideas and understandings. A chance for you to learn new things and discuss your vision of what museums are.

FoHMuseums is real, you are now in the reality of museums, here you see the daily struggles, the pressures on museums to diversify incomes, sell more, become accessible. You will get insights into your museums strategy, why it charges what it does, why certain things can’t happen, again the reality of museums. Maybe this is your first experience of a museum beyond reading text books, volunteering or visiting. The skills and real world experience are valuable to your personal and career development. These experiences will shape your view of museums, its no longer just a case a study it is part of your life. These experiences may lead you to choose a career working FoHMuseums.

A Career Working FoHMuseums

Why not use these skills which you have worked hard developing and work FoH in museums? A career working FoHMuseums could be fantastic, a chance to define how this generation and the next experience our heritage, making our heritage accessible to all.

FoHMuseums is much more than just the exchange of money for tickets or any other stereotype which can be associated with FoH. There is much more to FoHMuseums. You and your team are full of knowledge, from the day to day running of the site to the encyclopaedic knowledge you need to have of your site to answer any question, however crazy it may be. If you think about it, FoH are probably more likely to share their knowledge to the public for the simple reason they are interacting with the public everyday. FoH perhaps do the most work to make heritage accessible, you know the language you need to use, and the importance to make our museums accessible to all visitors ensuring we create strategies and plans to make our heritage accessible. To choose a career in FoHMuseums is to choose a career of preservation, preserving human interaction with out heritage, this is the conservation of the intangible, making an object an artefact.

FoHMuseums provides valuable skills essential to a successful career in the museum sector both BoH and FoH, where ever you choose to go in your career starting out in FoH will provide valuable skills, experiences, friendships, networks and an understanding of what a museum is, the reality of museums.

By William Tregaskes

Operations is a Specialism too!

Recently I was lucky enough to be involved in Museums Showoff (it’s a great idea and promotes sharing, learning and laughs all at the same time). What struck me was that I was the first person to stand up and talk about Operations. I wondered why that might be, and I think perhaps that although we are always championing our cause, Front of House and Operational teams tend to think what we do is about facilitation rather than creation and as such leave the talking to everyone else.

The crux of my set was that museums and heritage professionals rightly give a lot of consideration to how we label collections. It is, let’s face it, a key part of what we do. We debate the labels, consider how our visitors might interpret them, and what hidden meanings there might be. We take a huge amount of care.

So why are we often less considerate when it comes to naming our roles? Many organisations, not just in heritage, label teams as either ‘specialists’ or ‘Ops’. In itself that isn’t an issue. Despite the current fashion for rejecting experts I’m pretty confident anyone would agree colleagues working in curation, education, interpretation and conservation (to name just a few diverse areas) are what set us apart.

However, we underestimate the level of expertise that exists in operational teams. Is this because these careers don’t always follow an academic pattern? Often don’t involve membership of a range of industry bodies, or maybe because we don’t do ourselves justice by speaking up?

It’s hard even to define ‘Operations’; it’s so often ‘everything else’ and often delivered by different people in different roles. Where I work, admittedly in a palace, it covers both an immediate team of grandly named; State Apartment Warders, Admissions, Contact Centre and Security, and beyond that, day to day coordination of all other users of the site, accountability for visitor experience and generally appearing calm in the face of everything.

Our job is to make ‘crazy ideas happen’.  And it’s a brilliant job to have. We work alongside colleagues in other departments who also get labelled as ‘Ops’. Where I work that’s Maintenance, Gardens or Commercial Events, even a Chapel Royal. All different enough skill sets to be different teams, but all under the ‘Ops’ umbrella.

I’ve concluded (tongue in cheek to an extent) that if you want to know whether something your project team are working on is an ‘Operational issue’ you simply have to ask whether it is ‘tricky’, ‘tedious’ or ‘terrifying’. Whilst this is intended partly in jest I think there’s truth here too. Often the big ideas are generated but the detail of how they work is then handed over… and that’s fine because that’s what Operational teams are specialist at and what we want to do. All we should be asking for (as we work out visitor safety, risk assessments, fire evacuation and staffing rotas) is more than a day’s notice, and a slightly insufficient budget*.

So whenever I speak to anyone considering a career in heritage I encourage them to get into ‘Ops’ as a career not just a stepping stone. It’s a chance to be involved everywhere, to talk to everyone (front and back of house) and, once you’ve built up your knowledge and experience you can remind everyone you speak to that it’s a specialism too! If they suggest it isn’t- hand them your duty manager radio, or the keys to the place they work and wish them the very best of luck for when the lights go off or the toilets block.

*let’s be honest. No department whether specialist or operational is ever going to be happy with the budget!

By David Hingley Head of Operations at Hampton Court Palace

All images copyright David Hingley