Are CEOs Losing Faith in Internal Events?
Ashley Freeman
Delivering award winning 'live' engagement experiences and programmes for leading global businesses and brands
Do your internal events deliver successfully on your organisation’s ‘business critical’ goals?
If used effectively, internal events can be used to influence ‘business critical’ measures such as employee engagement, revenue and profit.
Our latest research, though, shows that many CEO’s are not convinced.
We believe that this comes down to a lack of hard proof that internal events are delivering long-term behavioural change or hitting other significant indicators of success.
INVOLVE Insight 2014 Survey
The INVOLVE Insight 2014 survey, published today (19/11/2014) spoke to 199 HR, Marketing and Communications Directors in large corporations with an events budget of over ￡100000, who are responsible for – or significantly involved in – the management of big internal conferences and events. We also spoke to 100 events managers in large corporations.
Our survey, based on research carried out in June and August 2014 by Illuma Research, found that almost half of all CEOs surveyed see internal events as a cost, rather than an investment. We also noticed a distinct disparity between the views of CEOs and employees:
There is a clear disconnect between the CEO’s view of internal events and the views of the rest of the company.
While only half of CEOs (51%) see internal events as an investment, two thirds of employees (67%) see their inherent value.Why can’t CEOs see the value in something that is clearly important to their workforce?
How Do We Create More Commitment to Internal Events?
Although events are used to influence ‘business critical’ measures, corporates are not consistently measuring whether they are achieving goals.
To guarantee the long-term growth of this industry and determine whether internal events are truly effective, we need to be able to use robust measurements to track ROI. Only once we have acquired that positive empirical evidence can we prove the value of internal events categorically.
Only 54% of directors claim to robustly measure the ROI of internal events. Event managers, meanwhile , claim to be more committed to measurement, with 62% saying they do so very robustly. Not surprisingly perhaps, those with larger events spends claim to be better at evaluation (61% as opposed to 46%).
Until we can increase these percentages, we won’t be able to convince CEOs once and for all of the true value of internal events for communication and employee engagement.
The INVOLVE Insight 2014 report also looks into what makes a good events manager, the traits of a good internal events agency and what is likely to change in internal events in the next 2-3 years.
To read the full report here.
Content creator/ editor / internal communications
10 年Albeit anecdotal, haven't seen any lack of enthusiasm for internal comms events among the clients I serve. There's a growing appreciation among senior managers that these events can be measured in terms of how they improve employees' skills, productivity and commitment to their organisation. HR teams now insist on measuring the skills development of employees year-on-year through annual reviews conducted by managers and with future targets set each year. The internal comms events I have been involved with clearly get full backing and commitment of management and yield real commercial benefits. Better cross-company working results, products and services are enhanced and new solutions are born from the cross-fertilisation of ideas.
Executive & Organizational Communications Leader at Microsoft
10 年I believe that nothing helps alignment, morale, and inspiration other than bringing people together. Yes, all hands meetings are expensive and logistics are difficult when dealing with multi-country situations. However, they are impactful and meaningful to employees. CEOs may not see the value since they have a view across the organization and know keenly what's happening. However, for your typical employee, they only have eyes into their own departments. So, these meetings help them gain insight into activities outside their own teams and perhaps how their work supports work in other departments. All of that said, I think it's more valuable to break the information into consumable chunks. When I started at Microsoft in 1998, the company meeting was an all-day marathon session with little information actually being retained and employees often leaving early for workday issues. I also highly value virtual meetings that are interactive.
IT Operations/Governance | Strategic Planning | Incident Response/Management | CyberSecurity
10 年The use of Internal events and the effect they have on the engagement, communication, achievement of goals, goes back to perspective of those involved and the culture they work in - not specifically the organization's culture, but the culture of the business unit, department, or team. I attended a presentation by Conrado Morlan earlier this week; he used a quote by Peter Drucker that could explain this partially: "Culture eats Strategy for breakfast".