Strategic Meetings Management

Recently, even though I was physically in Prague at the ACTE Global Education Conference, through the wonders of technology, I was able to take part in a new StarCite webinar -- "The Hidden Risk of Your Company's Meetings: How Strategic Meetings Management Can Save Your Company More Than Money."

Created by ProMedia.travel, I was joined by Debi Scholar, Assurance Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Tamara Gordon, Director of Travel, Meetings & Fleet at Boston Scientific, with Elizabeth West of ProMedia moderating. All the panelists brought terrific insight and helpful information on mitigating major areas of meetings-related risk, including:

 - Regulatory (e.g. SOX regulations on competitive bidding or U.S. Treasury rules around "excessive" or "luxury" spend by TARP companies)
- Contractual (entering into deals without terms and conditions that protect your company from onerous cancellation and attrition penalties)
- Payment (late fees, non-payment or intentional fraud by employees)
- Safety/Security (identifying and assisting attendees during natural disasters and other emergencies)

My colleagues and I discussed some key ways you can identify risk, work with contacts in your legal and procurement departments to create mitigation strategies, use automation to help you manage risk system-wide and make meetings risk a real, visible issue to your senior executives -- in order to gain their support.

Just to dramatize how serious meetings risk is to companies, a poll taken during the webinar revealed that more than half of listeners had no standardized contracts for meetings. That leaves them open to substantial financial loss if they need to cancel a meeting or they don't fulfill a room block commitment. Yet, at the same time, about 80% said they were most concerned about contractual risk. If you're one of those firms without standard contract addendum that you can attach to RFPs, Tamara Gordon gave some great, practical how-to tips on collaborating with your legal and procurement folks to create and use effective contract protection.

This webinar is packed with good advice and well worth your listening time. Even if you think you've got all your risk bases covered, you may discover there's some area you've been neglecting.

Catch the replay on mitigating meetings risk!