meeting industry

COVID, duty of care, and the meeting industry

Monday, July 25th, 2022 by Adrian Segar

COVID duty of care: an illustration of an audience at a meeting with coronavirus molecules floating in the air above themEvent professionals: let’s talk about COVID, duty of care, and the meeting industry.

We’ve known since mid-2019 that COVID-19 spreads by airborne aerosol transmission. (This makes me wonder why the GBAC STAR™ Facility Accreditation, with its emphasis on disinfection and cleaning surfaces and neglect of adequate ventilation, is still a thing.)

As I write this, the BA.5 Omicron variant is fueling the latest surge in COVID-19 cases in the U.S. The World Health Organization (WHO) just announced that COVID cases have tripled across Europe and hospitalizations have doubled. And “as Omicron rages on, scientists have no idea what comes next“.

The reality is we are still suffering a pandemic, currently dominated by the most contagious variant of COVID-19 yet: BA.5. The worst variant to date, BA.5 is four times more resistant to messenger RNA vaccines than earlier strains of omicron and is leading to significant increases in hospitalizations and ICU admissions.

As a result, WHO’s Emergency Committee has announced that Covid-19 remains a Public Health Emergency of International Concern — its highest level of alert.

Meanwhile, the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention reports that “Nearly one in five American adults who have had COVID-19 still have Long COVID“. And a U.S. Veterans Affairs study suggests that a second infection doubles the risk for death, blood clots, and lung damage, and increases the risk of hospitalization by three times, with every COVID reinfection increasing the risk for bad outcomes.

Yet the meeting industry seems to be abrogating its traditional responsibilities to keep attendees and staff safe.

Why are superspreader events still happening?

Every month I hear of more superspreader events. Here are a few recent examples:

  1. Veteran meeting planner Dianne Davis shared details about an event she produced in January 2022. Despite taking almost every standard precaution [“72-hour PCR test on them at all times or their triple vaccination card. Temp checks twice a day. Hand sanitizer. N-95 masks were provided and required to be worn anytime not actively eating or drinking. Onsite rapid tests every other day. Used a color-coded system for levels of contact comfort. Set room for social distancing.”] a third of the attendees contracted COVID. Probable culprits: (unmasked) indoor meals and socials.
  2. At the May 2022 New York City Criminal Court Judges Association three-day retreat, 30% of the attendees tested positive for Covid in the days after the event ended. The possible culprit: a karaoke session.
  3. Many attendees reported that the recent meeting industry conference IMEX Frankfurt 2022, held May 31, 2022 – Jun 2, 2022, was a superspreader event. A friend who attended tells me that he and 18 out of his 120 IMEX contacts contracted COVID there. Likely culprits: those (unmasked) indoor meals and socials will get you every time.
  4. The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing 2022 conference, Amsterdam, 11 to 15 July 2022 from  #SHARP2022:


These events are only the tip of the iceberg since it’s clear that many superspreader events go unreported. (For example, I can’t find a single public mention of the IMEX Frankfurt COVID cases.)

Duty of care

The meeting industry doesn’t provide appropriate duty of care for its own events

Besides the superspreader IMEX Frankfurt 2022 event mentioned above, MPI’s WEC San Francisco 2022 showed a lax approach to COVID duty of care. MPI didn’t require proof of vaccination or a rapid antigen test to enter the venue, Moscone West. Alameda County to the south reinstituted indoor masking requirements a few weeks before the meeting, driven by a rise in daily Covid-19 cases that exceeded the peak of last summer’s Delta wave. But San Francisco resisted following suit, and MPI decided to follow San Francisco’s relaxed protocols.

Currently, I think that the best practice COVID duty of care should include proof of vaccination (at least two shots) or daily on-site testing. I haven’t heard of COVID cases tied to the event, but I can’t find any assurances that the existence of any cases would be shared with attendees post-event. [Attendees may have been protected to some degree because the Moscone Center HVAC system uses MERV 13 filtration and the big receptions were held outdoors.]

MPI’s approach for WEC seems at odds with that espoused by their principal health and safety advisor: InHouse Physicians. In a July 6 2022 post on the MPI blog, Dr. Jonathan Spero, the CEO of InHouse Physicians says:

“We have not moved from the pandemic to the endemic stage yet.”

“…the average mortality rate of COVID is turning out to be around 0.5%. We could easily have another pandemic with a 5% mortality rate.  Imagine a tenfold increase in mortality and what it would do to the meeting industry and the entire global economy.”

“…I believe it is essential for planners who want to be successful to provide attendees with…health security measures that meet your responsibilities, and the expectations and potential concerns of your attendees.“

We are failing to provide adequate COVID duty of care

Some argue that most people are unlikely to suffer serious consequences from contracting COVID-19. They are overlooking the 3% of the population in the United States—some seven million people—who are considered moderately to severely immunocompromised, making them more at risk for serious illness if they contract COVID-19, even after vaccination.

Here’s one of them:

Immunocompromised attendees, staff, and suppliers want to be at your meetings and will be at your meetings. Do you think it’s OK to ignore their critical needs?

If the meeting industry can’t adequately protect its members at IMEX Frankfort, what’s the likelihood its members can or will ensure an appropriate COVID duty of care at other meetings?

I’ll conclude with a personal story. My daughter, already suffering from long covid, has to attend a 400-person business conference next week. She is worried. Although the event has vaccination requirements, no one has supplied any information about indoor air quality at the venue. She plans to take meals outdoors and skip the socials. But she’s still concerned about being exposed to people with COVID. And she has every reason to be concerned. With current infection rates in the U.S., the probability is essentially 100% that she’ll be sitting in the same room as infectious attendees.

We can and should do better than this. If we’re going to hold in-person events, we have a duty of care to follow best practices for our attendees as well as hotel staff and suppliers of services.

The meeting industry has developed a disconnect between COVID safety precautions and duty of care.

This needs to change. We know what we need to do. It’s not rocket science. Do it!

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Something is rotten in the state of meeting industry education

Monday, April 9th, 2018 by Adrian Segar

Image of an actor declaring "Something is rotten in the state of meeting industry education" to a human skull in the palm of his hand

I hear increasing concern from the meeting professionals community about the deterioration of the quality of our national industry conferences. A thread on the MECO community (a great resource for meeting professionals since 2006) describes numerous recent basic logistical failings, and points to what I see as symptoms of fundamental problems with meeting industry associations at the national level.

In a nutshell, I think that our industry associations have become too focused on justifying their continued existence financially. They are neglecting their core mission of supporting and representing their members and association meeting attendees.

Meeting industry education

I’ll illustrate with the area where I have the most experience: providing education at these meetings. In my opinion (and many other event professionals with whom I’ve spoken) the “educational” content at the national meetings these days is sub-par. I suspect it’s because the processes for choosing it are seriously flawed and completely opaque.

I’ve lost count of the conference session proposals I’ve made to meeting industry associations. They wind through multiple months-long steps. And then, at the last possible moment, I receive a rejection with no explanation and a boilerplate request to submit more next year. Meanwhile, it’s clear from a review of industry conference programs that employees of sponsors or trade show exhibitors give large numbers of presentations. Also solicited/accepted are keynote/motivational speakers. These folks receive large fees and provide exciting presentations with, in my experience, little or no content of long-term value to the meeting attendees. (Think back to the big-name speakers you’ve listened to in the past. Be honest now, how many of them have changed your professional life in any significant way?) But their inclusion looks good on the promotional materials.

In my case, the demand for the meeting design and facilitation services I provide has been exploding. (In the first quarter of 2018, I’ve booked more business than all of 2017.) Most clients and meeting industry professionals have yet to experience how effective participant-driven, participation-rich design, and facilitation can radically improve their meetings for participants and stakeholders alike. So there’s plenty of work yet to do, and not enough people experienced enough to do it.

Our industry conferences are the obvious places to provide this education.

My contributions to meeting education are Participate! workshops. These provide experiences that significantly improve how the participants design their meetings. They are, in my opinion, fundamental education. They’re certainly on par with the sessions we see at the annual conferences every year on “hot event items”, F&B trends, and meeting management. Yet experiential meeting design is not acknowledged at meeting industry conferences as an overlooked fundamental competency that needs to be offered on a regular basis. Rather, it’s seen as a “hot topic” that can be covered once and subsequently ignored.

Pay presenters!

In addition, industry associations have essentially given up paying for professional education at their events. They prefer, it seems, to spend money on the big-name players I mentioned above. These days, someone like me is lucky to obtain event registration and expense reimbursement. (Let alone any kind of token fee for the hours it takes to design and prepare a great session.) This further biases session submissions in favor of sponsors and corporations who are attending the event anyway for marketing purposes.

Many other independent meeting professionals I know who love our industry, are great presenters, and have unparalleled expertise in important perennial meeting education areas have told me about similar rejections. Most of us have pretty much given up submitting sessions as a result.

Some may see what I’ve written as sour grapes. I’ll only add that I’ve been an educator of one kind or another for forty years. There’s a significant unmet need for what I and other experts do. And I’m frustrated that meeting associations, whose purported mission is serving our industry, stymie our offers to share our expertise with our fellow professionals.

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Dear Adrian—How do I break in to the event services industry?

Monday, January 14th, 2013 by Adrian Segar

event services industr. Photograph of Adrian Segar holding his granddaughter in an indoor playhouse. She is waving at the camera.Another issue of an occasional series—Dear Adrian—in which I answer questions sent to me about event design, elementary particle physics, solar hot water systems, and anything else I might conceivably know something about. If you have a question you’d like me to answer, please write to me (don’t worry, I won’t publish anything without your permission).

 

Q. Dear Adrian,

I was wondering if you would be able to share some of your experience in the events services industry. I’m a Middle East Studies professional and I’m looking towards a career change into event management. I was just wondering what you studied, and how you got into conference design. What were some of the difficulties you had along the way? How does one “break into” the conference and events services industry with a degree in liberal arts?

In your book, which I am reading (which is amazing by the way, congrats!) it says that you managed a solar domestic hot water heating system manufacturing company. How on earth did you get into event management with that background?

I appreciate any answers you might have time to answer and I thank you.

Kind regards,

A student in George Washington University’s Event Management Certificate program.

A. Dear Student,

I’m afraid that the career path that led to my “breaking” into the event services industry is so atypical that it can in no way serve as a guide to others. This post has some information that sheds a little light on the circumstances.

And yet there is something one can learn from the strange journey that brought me into the conference and event services industry. Although I have only been connected to the “professional” event industry world for a few years, I have met and learned a little about the backgrounds of hundreds of event professionals in many industry segments. And I can assure you that a majority of those people did not plan a career in our industry but, like myself, found a calling or attraction to their work.

The people I’ve met have prior experience in all kinds of seemingly unrelated fields. Besides hospitality experience, which you might well expect to be a precursor, I’ve met people who have years of theatre experience, people with degrees in computer science or who worked in high tech, who started organizing conferences around a hobby they loved, and who ran companies and associations related to completely different industries.

As a result, my conclusion is that you are unlikely to be able to predict the fit for an events industry position by simply looking at prior experience listed on a résumé. Founding and managing my solar hot water manufacturing company, for example, gave me valuable business experience in a host of areas: finance and business planning, working with employees and contractors, marketing, and selling, to name a few. (And I’d add that your liberal arts degree could be excellent preparation for a career in the events industry, as a good program teaches you how to think creatively about a wide range of subjects; valuable expertise in such a diverse, wide-ranging, and often fast-paced industry as ours.)

What the event professionals I’ve met who clearly enjoy their work all have in common is their pleasure and satisfaction in successfully creating an enjoyable environment where people can come together, connect, and learn. That’s certainly what motivates my work. Is it something that also speaks to you? Then, if you have or can build the necessary competencies over time, there’s a place for you in this profession.

As far as practical considerations go, there are a wealth of opportunities available to you. I’m a big believer in the power of personal networking, whether face-to-face or, increasingly, online. The local chapters of industry associations are an obvious starting point. Reach out to your local chapter and explain your situation; attend a meeting or two and start to network there. Can you afford to volunteer or intern? This is one of the best ways for people and organizations to learn your capabilities, potentially leading to paying job opportunities.

Online, the MeetingsCommunity (commonly known as MeCo) has proved to be a great resource over the years. Check out the #eventprofs #mpi #pcma, and #ises streams of tweets on Twitter. Also, explore the many LinkedIn groups that cover every facet of the industry.

I hope this is helpful. Getting started in the event services industry is probably the hardest part. But persistence, with a bit of luck and serendipity, is usually rewarded. I wish you well in your endeavors. Keep me posted about what happens!

With best wishes,

-Adrian Segar-

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