Happy Christmas

Seasons greetings from Corporate Event. It's been a fairly good year. We've seen important clients from the banking and finance world coming back, which is very welcome. It's all very well demonising certain business sectors but when you depend on them for work it's less helpful.

Next year is going to be interesting The first quarter is usually held up by government spending and it's fairly safe to assume that won't happen in 2011. Will the private sector hold up the recovery as hoped by the government? We shall see.

Seasonal Corporate Events

We're moving from the Summer months to the colder seasons and events are starting to move indoors. There's a lot to be said for outdoor team building events at this time of year; the Autumn trees are fabulous and there's that great smell of leaves and bonfires. After the event you can head indoors for logs fires and hot drinks. It's all quite magical.

Team Building for Students

We've just delivered an event for the year six students of an Academy school that we've done for the last six years. The aim is to get them all together at the beginning of the new year and give them a positive shared experience to set them off in the best possible way.

I'm always impressed by these youngsters. They get involved in the activities and are engaging and engaged. They enjoy the day and you can see them and their relationships grow over the course of the event.

Perhaps it's because they're in a good school where they have to put effort in if they want it to work out. Perhaps it's because it's the sort of school and the type of teachers who will hold a team building at the beginning of the year - it's a pretty enlightened idea.

Whatever it is it's a pity that, after six years, this year is likely to be the last one. They won't be getting the funding for it next year. I understand that we don't have the money any more and I'm not surprised. There will be lots of situations like this where it's a shame and there's not much that can be done about it.

Professional corporate event presentation

Progressive Resources has made a huge investment in its corporate events and one of the most visible outcomes is what seems to be hundreds of flight cases.

Every piece of equipment now has a home, with shapes cut into the foam inserts so that everything fits into its own space.

It does look really good and very professional. Flight cases are tactile, people like using them. Things have certainly moved on from the days of string, tape and oil barrels.

More phone answering problems

I blogged a while ago about hotels not answering their telephones. Yesterday I was trying to place a £10,000 booking and half of the hotels I tried to contact did not answer their phone, or didn't have anyone available who could help me. It just doesn't make sense.

I Tweeted about the problem and was immediately telephoned by a venue finding agency and a hotel group. Pretty impressive. There's the thing, really. You can divide the market into two types of business. The first type just doesn't seem to care, or isn't very switched on. The second type is right there on the pulse, reacting immediately to the changing world not only by answering the phone but scanning proactively for opportunities.

I don't have any data to prove the theory, but I can be fairly confident that the latter will be more successful.

The state of the event business

The event business is definately showing signs of improvement. Last year it was Pharmaceutical clients and The Government that kept us all going. This year Government business has started to contract, although there is still a fair amount of it around. It's surprising that there's anything, but I suppose it takes time for cuts to come through.

The really good news has been the return of the banks and financials. This was always the main source of business and it literally froze in 2009. Not only were there not the budgets but organisations in that sector were very concerned not to be seen to be doing anything that would lead to accusations of frivolity. That unfair accusation deserves a blog of its own, but it was the way that people felt. Now times are improving and their business is starting to come back. Great news!

Doing business with hotels

I can see that this is going to become one of my pet subjects. Why do hotels make it so difficult to do business with them?

Take my interaction with Crowne Plaza hotels today. I used Google to find a contact telephone number and I think we can probably assume that most people would do the same thing. So, we're talking about the main communication avanue between them and new business. I'm given an 0871 number and told that it will cost me 10p per minute. I haven't studied call charges for a while so I don't know if this is better or worse than normal rates, but I have the feeling something cynical is going on.

I telephoned them with one simple question: 'what is your day delegate rate?' After a fairly long message (at 10p per minute) going on about a customer satisfaction service that I'm not interested in I spoke to someone who told me I'd have to speak to the hotel and who gave me another 0871 number. I get this a lot, the sheer frustration of dealing with central reservations.

I then called the new number and was put through to an extension number that didn't answer. I was returned to the switchboard who put me through to someone else. Don't forget I'm feeling edgy because I know this is all costing me 10p per minute.

Finally I'm speaking to a person but they're reluctant to give me the rate I need to finish my proposal until they've taken my address, telephone number and email address. Even then I have to go through a whole discussion about how and why rates might change.

So, the event part of my proposal took me five minutes and the one piece of information from the hotel took me about 10 minutes to get and a whole load of frustration and stress.

I don't know how much these venues spend on marketing, exhibitions and whatever but why on earth do they make clients jump through hoops to get a fairly basic bit of key information?

Embedding company values

Film making is a very effective way of embedding company values. Many employees are unfamiliar with the company values that are published in annual reports and on the corporate website. The words and concepts seem remote and unfamiliar.

Using a film making team building event to make people more familiar with their corporate values is effective and makes a fun experience out of an important business objective.

On a recent event teams were given two out of their company's four stated values and they had to create a film from which the other teams could guess which values they were representing. They couldn't say the word or write it down, it had to be clear from the film.

There were four teams in total and all eight values were covered. The result was interesting and fun and working with the company values for a day helped everyone in the group to become familiar with not just the words but the behaviour behind them. The result was much more powerful and authentic that learning by rote.

Why don't hotels answer their phones?

It's very strange. Hotels are multi-million pound businesses and, if what you read in the press is true, the market is pretty tough at the moment. And yet here I am with a bluechip client wanting to book 40 rooms for an event in March and the first two venues I have called haven't answered their phones.

Are receptionists much more expensive than one would think?

Is the fun coming back into corporate events?

In 2009 we noticed that events with business linked outcomes were more popular than the more frivolous activities. Corporate executives were in a sombre mood, but the thing we heard more than anything was 'it's not what we do, it's what we are seen to do.'

It would be easy to by cynical about that, but the reality is that you would have to be pretty thick skinned not to feel that way. Already in 2010 we're hearing more of that good old word 'fun'. That will mean the return of events like the good old It's A Knockout coming back.

And so it should be. Fun is one of the key ingredients of a good event. It builds relationships and it reduces stress in the workplace. Fun is not a four letter word.