Meetings Managers Are Shouldering More Responsibilities

<B> Meetings Managers Are Shouldering More Responsibilities</B>

By Chris Davis

With a continued strong economy and corporations expanding nationally and internationally, meeting buyers are finding that they don't have very much time on their hands to take on additional job responsibilities.

A full 81 percent of 218 corporate meetings buyers polled in a recent Meetings Monitor survey indicated that their overall meetings responsibilities increased "a lot" or "somewhat" over the last year. About 17 percent indicated their responsibilities had stayed the same over the period, and only a little more than 1 percent reported fewer meetings responsibilities.

Nobody said their responsibilities had "decreased a lot."

Many corporations today, it seems, are holding more meetings, in more places, than they have in the recent past. As the survey shows, that means more action for meetings buyers.

"I would say my responsibilities have increased, and not just in the past year. In the last two years, they have increased a lot," said Jan Hennessey, corporate meetings manager for Kaiser Permanente of Oakland, Calif.

"Our organization has been going though a lot of reorganization and restructuring, and as that happens to the company, it seemed reasonable that meetings would also play a different role," she said. "So I moved into our headquarters and I'm focusing on more nationally than I used to. "

Of those respondents who said their responsibilities increased, half said that was due to their own initiative. About 23 percent said the initiative was the employer's. The remaining 27 percent said the increase was a result of a joint initiative between buyer and boss, meaning that a total of 77 percent of buyers who have seen their responsibilities increase did so at least partially at their own initiative.

"It's probably been a combination of my employer and myself," said Jan Gordon, vice president of meetings and special services for Financial Network Investment Corp. of Torrance, Calif. "Some of our programs are directly targeted to increasing marketing efforts and sales skills for our sales force and we do see results from that. My responsibilities have increased a lot. Our business has been excellent and we're providing more services to our sales force."

In addition to relatively strong business conditions, the recent spate of multimillion dollar mergers and acquisitions also has created an influx of new employees and new associations that have resulted in more meetings.

This was the case for Teresa Hibbs, a meeting planner with KFC Corp., now a unit of Tricon Global Restaurants Inc. of Louisville, Ky. Hibbs, whose responsibilities increased "a lot" over the past year, was a meeting planner with KFC when it formed the new company with Taco Bell and Pizza Hut after all three chains were spun off from PepsiCo.

"Our area of responsibility now is not only to do all the KFC meetings, but to also do all the Tricon meetings as well," Hibbs said. "Businesses are doing well and spending more on training and incentives for their people.

"Anytime that you have a change like this, you've got a lot of information that you need to disseminate to all the new employees, franchisees or whomever so that you can get the company's mission in line," she said. "So it's only natural that you'll have to spend that much more time and effort on meetings to share that information."

Of the respondents who said their responsibilities decreased or remained stationary, the most common reason given--48 percent of the responses--is that time constraints have prohibited buyers from taking on new responsibilities. Another 28 percent did not have any opportunity to add responsibility.

Some buyers do not wish for more responsibility, citing a lack of accompanying compensation increase or contentment with their current load of responsibilities. Satisfaction with their current responsibilities was cited by 24 percent, and 12 percent indicated that further responsibilities wouldn't result in extra pay. Another 8 percent said their working conditions made it impractical.

Dawn Penfold, president of recruitment firm Meetings Candidate Network in New York, hasn't seen any major changes in the industry concerning job responsibilities in the last year.

"The only real change is that people are requiring more technology knowledge. And that's the only thing. But in the buying base, I haven't seen many changes," Penfold said. "If the economy gets better, responsibilities are going to increase, but the economy has stayed fairly constant in the past year.