“We need to talk about…”

The level of trauma endured by event professionals over the last two years is something we will need to deal with as soon as possible. Businesses shut down, careers wiped out, forced pivots to virtual, relationships lost. These are just the tip of the iceberg. Before we talk hybrid, we will need to talk mental health. The people who were able to retain a job and had to do the work of two or three people - because companies were letting other people go – that is the missing piece of the mental health jigsaw here. Rightly, there has been a lot of love and support for those who lost jobs, but what about those that retained them? Will the stress go away? Well, it’s impossible to find people to hire. Even if companies want to hire people, it’s very tough to find talent right now, especially at a higher, more service-orientated level, because people are just burnt out. I’ve seen people just saying, ‘Okay, I can’t deal with this anymore’. The uncertainty is so hard to deal with. The fact that one day you think, ‘this is all over’ and then the next day a new variant comes in and messes up all the plans you made. What is adding to the panic is the fact that clients don’t seem to get it. Some clients are announcing that only vaccinated and tested people can come to the event, but they don’t want to enforce it, so they are leaving it to delegates to self-cert. Why would you do something like that? It’s the antithesis of what event planning is about, which is taking care of guests. Either you do it or you don’t. There’s a lot of denial about what has happened. Lots of the ‘let’s make it happen’ spirit, which is great, nobody wants to be in a tunnel of depression for the rest of their lives, but we must talk about what happened and how excruciating this process has been for a big portion of this industry. We need some leadership from the industry associations on this. We don’t need another chapter meeting on virtual meetings or the next normal. We need a four-hour open discussion on mental health where people can just jump in and just talk….

One of the hot issues right now for the events industry is the shortage of human resource to re-open and re-launch our activities. The fact that our industry has basically been shut down for 18 months has impacted the motivation of future professionals to get into this industry. Yesterday I learned that the lack of demand from prospective students for one of the tourism and hospitality programmes this coming year has prompted a college to close their tourism programme. So, this is scary. If our tourism and events programmes start to close, that labour and skills shortage is about to get a whole lot worse.

There's been too much focus on tech and platforms. It’s a bit like the meetings industry’s focus on venues and food and beverage before. That ‘logistical’ focus has now shifted to the hardware side of planning. Of course, meetings have changed, but, blinded by the need to do things differently, many people forget that essentially, the main issues related to meetings have remained the same: what is the meeting going to contribute to any kind of change? I am convinced meetings are an expression of the complexity of the communication between human beings and that this complexity is underestimated by many. There is still the thought that providing good content is enough, with little attention for things like process flow, moderation, and facilitation. There is a gradual shift, but there is still much to gain, especially in scientific congresses.

The pandemic has reinforced to me, that there’s a big accessibility issue in meetings that we’ve not really thought about. There’s an affordability issue, a geographical issue, but also an issue from a disability perspective and a diversity perspective. Associations are only as relevant as the content they are producing. Producing online content makes associations more accessible and therefore more relevant, so, it makes sense to start producing content both online and live. But here there are issues, too. I’m partially deaf and there’s a lot of event technology that is not able to deliver sub-titling, for example. A lot of event technology is not adaptable to audio description. So that’s another tranche of people we are discriminating against, the blind and partially sighted. Should associations be charging delegates the same fee? There are people who would benefit from attending who perhaps can’t afford to pay. So should we just dismiss them and say ‘no, you can’t attend because you don’t have the money.’ Think about the impact on early-career scientists, the people on the coalface doing the research. If they can’t attend should that stop them doing their research? The worst thing associations can do now is carry on as if nothing’s happened. Go back to the way things were, because ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’.” It’s about time as an industry we took a stance on this.

Why is no one talking about how we improve our sustainability credentials so we can start a new narrative on the importance of events providing human connection? If 100 per cent of the event sector supply chain had made a net zero carbon commitment by COP26 our narrative could shift to the legacy events enable. Until that time we are a sector that delivers logistics which coronavirus gave people the experience of living without and those logistics cause carbon footprints which our clients have made commitments to reduce. There are businesses that won’t engage with this question or will just do their own version - many of these businesses fund or lead the channels we usually look to for event leadership (media, industry events, associations etc). This is not a unique situation for the event sector - what is different for events is how Covid-19 has impacted us and how a new narrative for the value of our sector is needed.