In the latest best-practices webinar from Lanyon, Shimon Avish — a leading Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) consultant—discussed how to design SMM policies that work by mitigating risk and promoting compliance. Avish identified the four gaps that SMM policies must avoid.
The Purchasing Gap
What falls through the purchasing gap? Your company’s savings! The policies that dictate how your employees buy goods and services—and whom they buy them from—form the core of your meeting and event program.
Your purchasing policies include the rules for engaging suppliers and procedures for booking, revising, and canceling events. These should reflect your company’s business objectives—ensuring that your company’s best interests are being served.
The Regulation Gap
There are many regulations that affect how companies do business. Not only are there international regulations to keep track of, but in the U.S., you also have federal, state, and local regulations to consider.
Some regulations affect all companies. Two major examples are the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (U.S.) and the U.K. Bribery Act. Having policies in place that enforce how your company spends on meetings and events can lower your company’s risk of fees and penalties in case of investigation.
Certain industries—such as financial services or pharmaceuticals—are subject to specific regulations. Noncompliance with these regulations can lead to hefty fees and penalties for your company, so it’s critical to have policies in place that close this gap.
The Duty-of-Care Gap
The world is an unpredictable place, and sometimes bad things happen. How do you ensure that—whether en route to an event, at an event, or during the return trip—your employees and attendees are safe and secure? And should something happen to them—or the city or the hotel they’re in—what can you do to protect them? It takes a well-constructed policy to dictate what should be done when the unthinkable occurs.
Duty-of-care doesn’t end with your employees. You need policies in place to protect sensitive information at events. Policies to fill this gap can include door monitors to control the influx of people into a corporate event, as well as rules governing the disposal of sensitive materials afterward.
The Enforcement Gap
Having the right policies in place to govern your company’s meetings and events is a crucial step toward an effective program. But even the most well-thought-out policies and procedures become useless if they’re not enforced.
Your company’s meeting and event policy should include sections that enforce compliance with those policies and consequences for noncompliance—from reminders and additional training, all the way to termination for chronic noncompliance.
Whether your company employs an in-house meeting manager or uses a third party—you need to consider having SMM technology that tracks what your meeting organizers are doing. This plays an integral role in ensuring their compliance with company policies.
For more tips on how to design meeting program policies that mitigate risk, standardize policies, and ensure compliance, watch the complete webinar—Mind the Gaps: Designing SMM Policies that Work—open to the public and available on demand.
