Ahead of the Future of Business Webinar on July 21st, Madeleine Cole of Venture Business discusses the effects of COVID-19 on exhibitions and events, the benefits of flexible working and the culture change that is needed to facilitate it, and the digital and hybrid events of the future.

HOW IS THE PANDEMIC CHANGED BUSINESS IN THE EVENTS SPACE?

When COVID hit and events stopped happening, that was a massive change for us. It was a real paralysis, and it's been really interesting to see some of the research tracking the emotions people went through, as you can directly map those to the business decisions that were made. Initially it felt as though everyone’s attitude was, it’s going be fine, events will go ahead normal, nothing's wrong. Then the gates came down and we realised that that wasn’t going to be the case. Then there was a period where everybody felt like they should be doing something, and lots of webinars appeared, lots of digital content.  Some events ran the content as webinars on their existing sites, but our view is that that's not a true digital event and the events appearing now have had the time to consider their offering from a UX and commercial aspect and they’re much slicker. We were flooded with webinars and thought leadership and podcasts, and  then there was a period where everybody stopped and thought, what are we going to do next?

Finally there was a considered step back and a look at the industry. If you speak to a lot of the technology platforms now, they are completely awash with new business. Now, either the bigger exhibitions that might find it slightly harder to pivot have all been reforecast to next year, and people are understanding what a digital solution would look like, and certainly exploring hybrid solutions – I personally think that hybrid is the future. Everything needs to have a digital element from an inclusivity perspective, that's the resounding outcome of moving everything digitally, it’s so much more inclusive for people that can't necessarily travel to an event. It's really important that we keep that element of events.

We also need to better utilise the amazing data from the events, and realise that actually the data in itself is a route to market for our clients and we could be doing a lot more with that. That also goes for the content that is produced at an event –we get the best speakers globally all together for three days, have these amazing conversations, and then we walk away from that at the end of the event and nothing happens with it. What a complete shame that is. There's so much more we could do with it, it's got a much longer shelf life than three days.

YOU RUN EVENTS FOCUSED ON FLEXIBLE WORKING – HOW HAS THE PANDEMIC CHANGED THE WAY WE WORK?

It has been a really interesting time for us, because everything that we've been striving for and preaching about all happened overnight! So many businesses that had previously said, our organisation can't work remotely or can't allow for an element of flex, they all did it literally in two days. Then there are the ricochet effects of that on the gender pay gap. One of the biggest issues with flex is that is often seen as a women's perogative or a mother's perogative in particular, whereas now men that previously wouldn't have been brave enough to ask for flex or even perhaps realise the benefits of it are now realising how fundamental it can be to achieving the best work life balance.

So I definitely think it's going to be great from a gender equality perspective, in that men will now want the same flexible opportunities as women. But in the short term, all the research has proven that the effects of the pandemic on women are appalling with women picking up even more, and being the first to quit their jobs to pick up the slack specifically around childcare.

That’s what our event is all about, helping organisations transition through the post COVID phase and to use flexible working as a gender equality enabler, rather than allow it to slow things back down. We're 50 years on from the Equal Pay Act, and we are further behind than we were ten years ago because of what's happened. We're running a survey at the moment to look at what the split on furlough was male/female within particular organisations, and now as the furlough scheme comes to an end, how many will be women and how many will be men? Because I think there's going to be a big fallout for women not being brought back, because children are still off and will be for the next few months, and the assumption is that women look after them. As an industry we need to be very careful to not allow that to happen either, because our industry is a bit guilty of being a bit of an old boys network on occasion, so there’s even more reason for us not to allow that to become more entrenched over this period.

DO YOU SEE THE PANDEMIC AS SERVING AS A CATALYST FOR CHANGE?

 From a flexible working perspective yes, I really hope so. I think there's still quite a lot of disbelief and cynicism – it’s not necessarily our fault, but we've trained managers to manage people by the fact that they're physically sitting in front of them, and we've applauded presenteeism rather than applauding outcomes. Prior to COVID, our expert speakers at our events are companies that have done this entire transition to flex, and it's taken them years. One of our companies that we work with, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), is phemonoal, their Head of people and culture is such an inspirational person, but it's taken him a really long time to get to where they are now. He says you can change frameworks, but ultimately, you need them to be the skeleton upon which to hang things, not the straitjackets to tie things up and that the biggest piece in all of this is to change your culture. We need to go from a culture of applauding presenteeism, and change it to a real high trust culture where actually you employ the right people in the first place, you bring them in, you implicitly trust them from the outset, you KPI them properly on deliverables rather than beating them up because they're not physically sat in front of you.

 Culture change needs to include diversity, too; the more diverse your board, the better your bottom line is. Most businesses exist to be commercially successful, and by having a more diverse team you're enabling a more successful business, so why would you not do that? Flexible working is the enabler for so many of those demographics that often aren't seen at C-Level.

WILL DIGITAL AND HYBRID EVENTS BE THE NEW NORMAL?

I think they are here to stay, but they won’t replace physical events, rather to compliment them.  I don't think any organisation is going to sign off the same sort of expense budgets that they did previously, and they will be more mindful of costs. There will still be companies who don’t allow employees to events until we are through the pandemic. In the last three or four months people have become completely comfortable with broadcasting themselves, whereas previously people would come kicking and screaming into video calls, they really weren’t happy with it, and that’s all changed. And it is the future – if you look at Generation Z and how they consume media, how they communicate with each other, how they form friendships, it's all done through social media and video.

The entire working piece has shifted us all towards the fact that we can communicate using the technology that we've got. Looking ahead to the next ten years, or even the next five years, we're going to have a five generation workforce, that's never happened before. People are living longer, people are staying in the workforce longer. We all need to be working the same way, we don't want people to get left behind because they're not as au fait with the tech, and equally we don't want to have generational communication gaps because we’re all communicating in different ways. COVID has forced this to happen.

It’s changed the way we communicate with clients, we communicate with each other, the way that we do business, the way that we sell. Companies are going to be questioning expense budgets, and they're going to say,  hang on a minute, we sent five of you to the exhibition last year, five hotel rooms for three nights, the cost of getting everybody there, the entertainment etc, we don't need to do that actually, let's send one of you and let everybody else be able to access the same content and engage with the same people online. For people such as carers for example, that previously couldn't have taken the three or four days out of the office to go to an event, they can still be part of it and still learn, they can still communicate and be engaged, be present, and be visible from a career point of view.

That's why hybrid events are going to be so important. And secondly, some people will want to consume information and engage, and network through a screen rather than face to face. So I think moving forward, any event organiser that doesn't have a hybrid solution is going to be missing a trick.

You can register for the Future of Business Webinar here.