Wellbeing in the Events Industry: The Importance of the Employee Experience
Wellbeing in the Events Industry: The Importance of the Employee Experience
Having collaborated with many cultural institutions on events, festivals and expos, this month’s article from Barker Langham Recruitment is inspired by an EventLAB panel discussion which brought together a range of professionals from the industry, with the aim of shining light on what has become an important topic of discussion across the cultural and creative sectors: wellbeing.
“Wellbeing”, as defined by the What Works Well Centre for Wellbeing, essentially means “how we are doing” as individuals, communities and as a nation. It is about our quality of life as we experience it, both physically and mentally, including how satisfied we are, how worthwhile we feel that our contributions are, and our general day-to-day emotional experiences. Crucially, it is these mental factors which have been typically overlooked within the workplace.
It is no surprise, however, that 1 in 3 events professionals will experience a period of mental ill health, 42% of employees have changed jobs due to stress, and, in the UK alone, stress accounts for 45% of lost workdays. And yet, the work itself is not the core factor contributing to these statistics – we are dealing with an industry which continues to grow, after all. Rather, EventLAB found that it is the workplace culture – the extent to which employees are able to manage, or not, their mental health during the extremely long hours and highly pressurised, fast paced environments – the main issue being a lack of communication and support across levels of staff.
As discussed by our Associate Consultant, Jon Ingham, the Organisation Prioritisation Model (OPM) should be used as a basis for better and more modern organisational design within Events:
“Connections – i.e. the links people have to other people; relationships – built upon these connections; and conversations – taking place within these relationships.”
We need to be thinking about the long-term effects of qualitative human connectedness within our organisations. Events staff are shaping minds and attitudes for the future, creating places of passion, ideas and shared collective vision.
We can only ensure these outcomes through the implementation of working environments in which staff themselves are able to feel inspired, and confident that they can get the necessary support when they need it. As CIPD suggest, this includes getting to know teams better, promoting healthy working habits, reviewing job design and workloads and assessing management styles regularly, to ensure that leaders are keeping on top of and responding to individual employee needs. This means creating a dialogue across all levels of staff in order to understand that, where wellbeing is concerned, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
Statistics show that higher employee wellbeing is intrinsically linked with higher productivity and firm performance, including lower staff turnover and higher business profitability. Most importantly for our sector, however, we must never forget that a positive Visitor Experience outcome is directly correlated to the quality of Employee Experience.
What do you think? Please do post your comments below.
Amy Borchard
Assistant Project Coordinator (Intern), Barker Langham Recruitment