Inspiration Hub

By now, you may have heard the good news about taking time off. The research that shows that employees who take vacations are more productive and creative is so compelling that some companies pay bonuses to those who take time out of the office. 

You’re a week from the event. The caterer wants to change the menu. Sponsors are requesting data that will take hours to pull. And your boss wants you to pitch the theme for your next event — today. You need to learn the art of saying no — whether to chaotic vendors, over-eager attendees, or your own staff. Giving in to every request can end up with you stretched too thin, making careless errors, or burning yourself out.

Along with the numbers that we crunch for the annual Convene Salary Survey, we ask a handful of open-ended questions. Including this one: What do you like least about your job? Although readers singled out problems including attrition and room blocks, cuts to hotel commissions, managing shrinking budgets, and dealing with inefficient work processes (“So. Many. Emails.,” was one response) the overwhelming majority of the answers to the question weren’t focused on logistical challenges. 

Everyone is hard on themselves at times, especially when it comes to our jobs. And those who plan and execute business events may encounter even greater-than-average opportunities to engage in self-criticism. After all, it’s impossible to make everyone at an event happy and clients, attendees, and colleagues usually aren’t shy about pointing out the things that they don’t like. “The industry and my specific department is full of perfectionists who have very little forgiveness,” was one answer when we asked readers to tell us what they liked least about their jobs in Convene‘s most recent Salary Survey. Another response: “The self-imposed stress of pleasing 100 percent of my meeting attendees.” 


Email—a great invention, though it occasionally can feel like the bane of an event professional’s existence as we try to meet deadlines and separate the must-reads from the deletes. With regular sign-ups for white papers, subscriptions for nuggets of key information and personal messages all combined in one inbox, it can feel overwhelming to open your mail app to tens of emails throughout the day. But there are ways to combat this without sacrificing your sanity, and few barely take more than a few minutes.

Feeling burned out at work? It happens to the best of us. You don’t have to look far for reasons why — according to Convene’s upcoming 2018 Salary Survey, to be published in June, nearly one-quarter of respondents spend more than 50 hours per week on the clock. The good news, according to a recent New York Times piece, “Feeling Burned Out? Here are 3 Things That Can Help,” is that there are a few simple thing you can do to get out of your funk. 

We are hearing a lot about mindfulness  — the act of being present and purposeful in our actions, including our actions at work, as a way to work smarter, rather than harder.

Burnout is on the rise in the U.K., where it's been called an 'Insidious epidemic.' How can meeting professionals respond to mounting pressure? The fact that burnout is on the rise was not surprising — we saw the same thing ourselves last year when dozens of people responding to our annual Salary Survey mentioned that long hours and stress were the least favorite aspects of their jobs. Our story also noted that although Americans tend to work longer hours than their European counterparts, work pressure is mounting in Europe. 

Conferences and meetings are usually thought of as sedentary events, as they require attendees to spend hours sitting down in enclosed spaces. Professionals in the events industry make significant efforts to create memorable events, but the health and well-being perspective often gets overlooked. In this post, we suggest five ways to ensure your next event promotes wellness and has a valuable impact on participants.

Why was I not surprised to see the first example of an employee who is highly engaged, but also burned out, in this Harvard Business Review article was a conference planner? Like so many of her planner peers, she threw everything she had into planning her event. Sadly, she ended up not leaving enough of herself for herself—she crashed before the conference happened and had to take time off to recover.

Meeting planning is consistently named one of the most stressful jobs—and stressed-out meeting planners tend to create stressful meetings. Mindful meeting professionals who practice being fully present in the moment without judgment tend to also plan their meetings more mindfully. The resulting events create deeper connections and more learning.

Meetings are an important tool in any business, but they can often go awry. With poorly defined agendas, individuals speaking up for self-validation and poor leadership, catch-ups can easily overrun, breaking up the flow of the day and reducing productivity. Poorly planned meetings can cause more harm than good. So how can you improve meeting outcomes and what is the best way to get the most out of your team? We’ve done a deep dive into the psychological research surrounding well-being in the workplace and meeting efficiency and here’s what we found.

If you are an event planner it’s safe to say you’ve been stressed out a time or two. But how do manage event planning stress? Dealing with stress as an event planner is a part of our every day. Event coordinators juggle so many jobs under the main job title of “event planner. One minute you might be dealing with pressures from your clients, maybe because of a budget restriction or a last-minute change. Another moment you might be traveling across the country to your next event. Perhaps it’s the actual day of the event that stresses you out, with the timeline not on schedule or unexpected problems that pop up. Regardless of the reasons you are stressed learning how to manage event planning stress is crucial to your success in the industry!

We’ve all heard the term “work-life balance” thrown around the last couple of years when it comes to figuring out our daily grind. But what does it really mean? Using the word balance can be a tricky move, as it can make us feel like we’re falling behind if we’re not poised exactly on that work-life line. And let’s be honest: Nothing is ever perfectly 50-50!

Now, if you’re a regular viewer / reader, you may recall that the effects of sleep deprivation is a subject that I touched on 6 month ago when the clocks went forward when I highlighted some fascinating research that suggested that, in court, a sleep deprived judge was likely to give a harsher sentence to a convicted criminal. This time I’ve got a couple of additional, equally fascinating insights.

The seats were empty, there was tumbleweed in the aisles… we’ve all had that one disastrous event where no one turned up.

It’s an excruciating experience, especially if you have other stakeholders to answer to. You probably wished the ground would just open up and swallow you, but don’t let one bad experience put you off from organising events.

Here we look at 10 positive steps you can take to bounce back from an unsuccessful event, how you can recover both emotionally and financially, and get everyone back on side.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel, working with Artemis Strategy Group, surveyed more than 1,900 business travelers from around the globe in spring 2017 for its CWT Connected Traveler Study. While researchers found that business travelers are indeed connected—on average carrying four types of technology—they also learned that many travelers find a lot to worry about when on the road and many use strategies to relieve some concerns, including buying insurance and signing up for alerts. To participate in the study, respondents had to have made more than four business trips within the past 12 months.

At MeetingsNet, we know the countdown to the holiday rush officially begins now. You are busy finishing up your 2017 meeting rosters, and are diligently preparing for your 2018 meetings and beyond. To support you, we’re partnering with mindful leadership expert Holly Duckworth, CMP, CAE, LSP, to bring you seven weeks of Mindful Monday mini-messages in our MeetingsNet Today daily newsletters. In these mini-lessons, you will learn what mindfulness is, why it matters, and one technique each week you can use to bring more mindfulness to your life and work.

Us event planners can easily get bogged down in email. Whether it’s from a co-worker, current client, or prospective customer, it can seem like climbing out of our email inbox and finally experiencing Inbox Zero is a far-away dream. The reality of email is that it’s a necessary evil of the events industry—but it doesn’t have to be the bane of your existence.

The reality is that my job comes home with me and can interfere with many of my best-laid plans; after all, issues may arise at any hour in the event technology world. However, they say you have to give some to get some - and it’s true. What we’re willing to give may differ for each individual, so it’s important to know what you ARE NOT willing to give. The solution to my personal success was to learn what these are for me…

We always ask respondents to our Salary Survey their most and least favorite part of their job, and get lots of answers for both, but the least-favorite entries are usually the most colorful. People tend to use them as a forum for teeing off on unappreciative bosses and colleagues, demanding attendees, and unreasonable suppliers. Workload is a regular concern, too — and since the Great Recession, often has been phrased along the lines of “being expected to do more with less.”

Tips to stay healthy while on business travel.

Research has found that mindfulness training alters our brains and how we engage with ourselves, others, and our work. When practiced and applied, mindfulness fundamentally alters the operating system of the mind. Through repeated mindfulness practice, brain activity is redirected from ancient, reactionary parts of the brain, including the limbic system, to the newest, rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.