Kevin Iwamoto is chief strategy officer at
Bizly. He is a former travel manager at Hewlett-Packard, executive at StarCite,
Active Network and Lanyon, and former president and CEO of the National
Business Travel Association.
Over the past year, the average workday has got 48 minutes longer and we are in 13 per cent more meetings, according to
the National Bureau of Economic Research, while 71 per cent of meetings are
considered unproductive and inefficient.
Meeting burnout and meeting fatigue are
real and are among the primary culprits for what management consulting company Gallup called a decline in
employee engagement last year as well as employee wellbeing concerns.
According to the US Travel Association,
formal meetings, events and incentives drive approximately 38 per cent of
business travel. That means casual business meetings comprise most of the rest,
but the fact that we're not travelling to those meetings now doesn't mean they
aren't happening.
Larger meetings and events have either been
postponed or shifted to virtual experiences organised by professionals. When
travel comes back, meetings professionals will still own and execute those
events, as long as they are driving value to the business.
Those more casual meetings that drive
business relationships? Those are a different breed. On the whole, they've
never been managed well, if at all managed. And, if conceivable, they are now
managed even less optimally with responsibility even more decentralised.
Thanks
to the pandemic, you now have team leaders, managers, project leaders, third-party
partner suppliers, even executives organising their own daily hybrid and virtual
meetings in completely new virtual environments. Yikes.
Have they done this before? Do they have a
clue about how to organise and run an online meeting that is totally dependent
upon technology? Do they understand the logistics of putting together an agenda
or sending out invitations that will get the critical people to attend? Are they
able to achieve the meeting objectives? Do they even know what the objectives
for the meeting are?
The answer is 'no', and most companies
aren't offering training or support in how to optimise the meetings experience within
virtual platforms. And, like it or not, the pandemic has transformed daily
meetings into the core of our workplace experience.
Think about that – the
meetings experience is now the workplace experience. What could that mean for
the people tasked with managing travel and meetings? I think it could mean a
lot, because meeting and travel managers already have the tools to correct it.
Meetings experience now equals workplace
experience
Post-pandemic, we are all looking at a
world whereby the C-suite is simply not going to believe in the need for travel
at the same level they did before.
So, this isn't the time to think about RFPs
and preferred rates. It's time to think strategically about providing better
meetings and using business intelligence in a way that can improve, optimise
and report on the employee experience and meetings efficacy.
It's also the time to think about new relationships
with internal partners.
Workplace and employee engagement generally
falls under the purview of human resources. The pre-pandemic working
relationship between the corporate travel department and HR was mostly centred
around employee duty of care, safety and security and diversity and inclusion issues
related to business travel and meetings programmes, policies and preferred
suppliers. Travel managers now should pivot that relationship to lean in and
grab ownership of the online meeting experience.
There are a few pioneering travel managers
that are proactively stepping forward to help figure this out, and offering to
own, manage and oversee this challenge which no doubt increases their internal
value, profile, and job security.
After all, travel managers have the
experience and knowledge of how to manage challenges like this using best
practices in policy creation, data collection, tech supplier sourcing,
understanding internal business needs and purpose, and supporting all of this in a
virtual/hybrid world.
Travel managers should seek to partner more
closely with HR and other executives to source the systems that make every
meeting better for employees, especially the virtual/hybrid meeting technology
that now is part of every employee's everyday work life.
The biggest problem
that travel managers have always faced with meetings management has been
getting adoption and visibility beyond their small group of administrators. By
partnering with HR, the territory and recommended solution becomes significantly
larger, as it impacts every employee, not just executive admins and
administrators. Travel managers have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to
positively impact the entire company beyond just cost savings.
In summary, assisting employees with reducing
bad meetings, optimising meetings, improving employee virtual/hybrid meeting
engagement and creating policies and an online meeting culture aligns to the
most urgent priorities companies are facing in 2021 and beyond.
Not only will
this improve the employee experience and productivity, but it also will
modernise your framework for business travel and daily meetings into the
future. It is a unique opportunity for travel managers to grab hold of and
add to their existing scope of work to yet again demonstrate their value to the
corporation.