Check-in for the Harmony Circles Appreciation Lunch

On 17 January we ran registration for the Harmony Circles Appreciation Lunch at Gardens by the Bay. The lunch honours volunteers who do the quiet, year-round work of keeping communities connected across race and religion, and it was graced by Minister of State Dinesh Vasu Dash (Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, and Ministry of Manpower).

Guests at a lunch like this arrive in a tight window, and a lot of them are community leaders whose time you don't want to burn at a check-in desk. So we lined up self-check-in stations along the entrance: scan, confirm, and the badge prints and is in hand within seconds. Every tablet had its own printer right next to it. That's what keeps a cluster of stations running in parallel instead of funnelling everyone toward one bottleneck.

Same setup whether we're checking in five hundred people or fifty. Make the front door quick, and people walk in thinking about who they came to see, not the queue they just cleared.