Raising issues of “sustainability” at your next event-planning meeting may induce a few stifled yawns in the boardroom, but those who snooze through this component, could be wasting valuable company time and money.
Meetings caught up with Guy Bigwood, who was in Cape Town visiting the MCI South Africa office. Guy is, among many other things, the Group Sustainability Director of MCI, the Swiss-based leading events management company and global advisor in the strategic engagement and activation of target audiences. We asked him about sustainability within the meetings industry.
Why is sustainability important to the meetings industry?
Sustainability in all its dimensions economic, environmental, and social is a continuing concern for meeting professionals and an increasingly central issue for clients and meeting participants who ultimately determine the industry’s success.
The meetings and events industry can be a powerful accelerator of sustainable development and hosting sustainable events can drive economic growth and advance social and environmental development in cities.
Internationally, the demand for sustainable meetings and events is becoming standard practice and the South African meetings industry needs to make it the foundation of its business practices rather than an add-on, if it wants to capitalize on this lucrative market.
At MCI we always viewed sustainability as a need to do the right thing. It has always been a strategic imperative for us since inception and is one of the reasons why MCI is the thought leader in this space. Sustainability is at the core of who we are and it’s an important ingredient in attracting and retaining the right talent and helping meetings and events organisers to realise their goals and objectives.
A significant change has happened over the last few years at MCI. We had been operating “below the line” in the events arena, but progressively began to play a more strategic role in determining how companies, institutions and associations engaged with and activated their audiences around sustainabilit
How can sustainability improve and benefit the industry?
One of the things the work of MCI has demonstrated is that doing this is right for your talent. If you want to attract and retain the brightest and the best talent you’ve got to have a sustainability programme. 99% of our staff expect MCI to care about the social and environmental impact of our operations.
We have seen how entrenching a sustainability mind-set has resulted in staff feeling like they are part of something with a mission.
Our job is to help our clients achieve their business objectives. So we have to integrate a sustainable type of thinking in a way that helps them achieve those objectives, and goes beyond what they have set as their target. So if we have sustainable food it needs to be packaged in a way that tells a story and that motivates a delegate to feel better and happier. Then they’re more likely to be in a space where they actively participate and engage and derive value from the meeting or event.
We have to become more scientific in the way in which we approach sustainability and come up with innovative ways and actions that increase business performance (such as food nutrition). We also need to look at designing menus around food that accelerates delegates brain activity rather than making them fall asleep.
