SITE NEWS

The art of serendipity

How healthy is your human capital post Covid-19? Many industries and trades have suffered from Covid-19 and bringing their people together will be a major need for corporations on the road to recovery.

By Hugo Slimbrouck, global director of strategic partnerships of SITE and JMIC past president.

Initially an invention to boost sales, incentive travel has been an established business tool for many years now, not only used to reward outperforming channel partners but increasingly, too, for purposes linked to motivation and engagement, employee satisfaction, team building and loyalty.

The business effects and stresses of Covid-19

Covid-19 has taken its toll on the well-being of our business communities. Individuals have become more distant from a common purpose and, in some cases, working remotely has had its influence on mental and physical exhaustion of the individual. The stress of working from home, with all its ‘negatives’, has settled in with many people. While there are positives, such as extra free time, and rediscovering local neighbourhoods, it’s been far from plain sailing. Often, couples with children have had to work side-by-side, monitoring conference calls and high energy youngsters at the same time. Others have been working in isolation for many hours. We may have saved many hours in traffic. But we also have had to cope with new stress factors such as solving ‘new’ digital matters and issues, the insecurity of being furloughed or put on part-time work whilst the bills kept coming in.

Teams have had ‘Teams’ to help communicate with colleagues and partners (once they got to understand how ‘Teams’ works) but still, people of the same team were not working at the same time or really lacked the physical and eye-to-eye connection. Zoom fatigue settled in many moons ago. With many people in traineeship being sent back home, even more tasks were added to our own people too, creating extra pressure. All these people need time for a break! Now that schools have reopened, corporations should probably look at responsible, motivational in-person activities again.

Time for a Boost

In this recovery period, many personal development and management tools are proving their business case. What better way to motivate organisations than by using travel and event incentives? By creating an incremental revenue, business incentives pay for themselves, so they should not present any budget issue. Now is the right time to use them!

Organisations need energy boosts. Those with a healthy company culture will have the advantage of picking up quickly again. Those with crosscompany learning programmes will not have stopped communicating and educating during Covid-19.

Where do we go from here?

Firstly, digital is not going away! A new destination has been put on the global map and its name is ‘Cloud’. Whatever we will do in the future, in terms of business events and incentive travel, will have a heavy ‘Cloud’ component to it, pre, during and post the event. The way in which organisations will have to energise through business events will always be a combination of a destination (local, short haul or long haul) and online.

In the way we bring together colleagues and leadership, the personal connection and team building, and the appreciation and connectedness will require coming together in the real world. It is the only way that really works, and the past year is only proof of that. Now is the time to build trust again by communicating and merging valuable contributions with trust in the organisation. Why? Because it is time to boost common goals and values again, with personal initiatives, drive, and competitiveness. Job satisfaction and loyalty need to be rewarded and motivated.

Just as families have been feeling the need to travel again, breathe a different air, eat the local food and enjoy the visual eye candy of a destination, the same is true for the meetings and incentive industry. Engaging audiences, either digitally or physically will remain an important task for any organisation. Most likely, these audiences will be more local or regional than previously. But smaller ‘live’ audiences will be complemented by larger ‘online’ participation which creates new opportunities once again. In an interview with the Swiss Convention Bureau, Sebastien Tondeur, chief executive officer of the MCI Group stated: “What is certain is that post Covid-19, 10 per cent of our professions will disappear and 100 per cent of our jobs will be different from what they used to be.”

Dépaysement

I have always found ‘Dépaysement’ a beautiful word in the French language; it means more than just its literal translation in English of ‘change of scenery’. We need to go away to focus, to absorb, to energise, to reward dedication and most of all, to let serendipity play its beneficial role and make us happy again. Going to inspiring places with different people who are willing to exchange their interests, their knowledge, their dreams, and abundance will create those moments of serendipity that will create the future for themselves and their organisations.