"We're facing a huge challenge, but it's an
exciting one..."

While there are some big challenges facing the sector as we head into The Next Normal, there’s also plenty to get excited about. Helen McCabe, managing director of BCD M&E UK, casts her eye over the current events landscape...

After a long and difficult 18 months, the sector finally looks like it’s going forward. In my view, there are three key headlines.

Firstly, we've got to remain smart and efficient with our technical solutions. Individuals are looking for more efficiency with regards to a more deeper understanding around duty of care, delegate travel and appropriate protocols. There's also an understanding around a wider delegate management solution.

How you care for your delegates while travelling is of paramount importance as things start to reopen. We've also continued to invest in best in class and proprietary software. This is another element that needs to be clearly focused on and clearly driven in the future, to allow delegates to be able to travel safely and to understand safety protocols.

Secondly, we're seeing an awful lot of RFP activity. Clients are going out to RFP to understand whether their choice of partner is appropriate for the future. They’re questioning things like payment terms, pricing models and sustainability, in particular when they're looking at RFPs for global virtual meetings. All the signs are that the corporates are getting really quite savvy in pulling together these global virtual RFPs. So virtual is here to stay.

The events we're looking at delivering and managing are a combination of face to face, hybrid and virtual. This flexibility to be able to diversify to those three different types of event delivery is absolutely critical. It’s a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity.

Finally, the skills and talent within our industry has been hit very hard. Furlough was an absolute lifeline here in the UK. I don't know any agency or organisation that didn't use furlough for their staff. And while those individuals were on furlough, they had a bit of a break from what is a highly intense industry. There are a lot of people that moved out. They chose other careers, they either moved back home or opted out of our wonderful industry, which is unsurprising.

Now we’re seeing the recovery starting to pick up and the appetite is coming now for events to take place. It’s a double edged sword, because we've got individuals who have chosen an alternative career path and others who are coming back from furlough and the landscape looks very different. We've evolved so quickly and had to do this huge U-turn during the last 18 months. We’re now having to retrain and reskill a lot of those who are coming back off furlough in order to be able to deal with this new normal. That is quite challenging.

We are also having to attract new talent into the business because of volume stepping up as well. And there’s a diversification of the requirements from clients as we've mentioned. So we’re looking at succession planning, attracting and retaining existing talent in an environment within meetings and events where turnover is very high.

If you look at how we deliver business today, versus how we delivered business in October 2019, nobody would have ever foreseen that we would have been able to deliver such fantastic solutions virtually.

I remember in the summer of 2019 working with the team to start our journey of how are we going to deliver solutions virtually – and in comparison to how we actually deliver them now, it's unrecognisable. And so we’re going into what is looking like an exciting future.

Nobody's underestimating how much of a challenge it is going to be, but the fact that we remain so close to our clients and continue to drive that high level of engagement as partners, it is exciting at the same time. If we can continue to evolve, continue to deliver the solutions in the future as we've been able to do in the last 18 months, I think we've got a positive future. Hopefully we can make our industry as exciting as it's always been.