I commented on a LinkedIn post this week about the seemingly never-ending debate over working from home versus working in an office.

The original post made a perfectly reasonable argument. Why make somebody spend hours travelling into an office, at considerable personal expense, just so they can sit at a desk and join the same Teams calls they could have joined from home? Why not recruit from a much wider geographical talent pool, reduce your office costs, give people greater flexibility, and bring everyone together occasionally when there is actually a reason to do so? All perfectly sensible.

My response, though, was that for me the argument isn’t really about meetings. Meetings can happen anywhere. We’ve spent the last six years proving that. It’s about everything that happens between the meetings.

Nothing in events operates independently

I think that’s particularly important when you’re delivering events.

Event management is an extraordinarily interconnected business. On paper, we can divide an event into neat little areas of responsibility. Someone manages registration. Someone looks after speakers. Someone is responsible for sponsorship. Someone deals with the venue. Someone manages marketing. Someone sorts out production.

In reality, of course, none of those things operates independently. The sponsorship manager discovers that a sponsor wants to bring a particularly enormous exhibition stand. That affects the floorplan, which affects catering, which affects delegate flow, which affects production, which might affect registrbation. A speaker changes their presentation. Someone overhears a conversation about it and realises that it creates a problem with the AV specification. Registration numbers suddenly jump. That’s great news for the marketing team, but somebody needs to tell the venue, somebody needs to order more lanyards, and somebody else needs to check whether we’ve now exceeded the capacity of one of the breakout rooms.

Events are basically hundreds, sometimes thousands, of interconnected decisions. And that is where I think remote working can make things more difficult. When we’re all sitting in the same office, I don’t necessarily need somebody to formally communicate every piece of information to me. I hear things.

Someone says something across the office and I think, “Hang on, have we thought about…?” I overhear two colleagues discussing a problem and realise that I’ve seen exactly the same thing happen before. Someone asks a question and another person who wasn’t even involved in the conversation knows the answer. Or, perhaps most importantly, I hear something that makes me realise we’re heading in the wrong direction and can intervene before it becomes a much bigger problem.

None of those interactions needs a meeting. In fact, if we had to create a meeting every time one of them happened, we’d spend our entire lives in meetings (and we all have enough those already!)

There is another element to this too: learning.

Events knowledge transfer is largely through experience

Events have always been an industry in which an enormous amount of knowledge is transferred through experience. You learn by listening to other people solve problems. You hear how an experienced event manager handles a difficult venue conversation. You listen to somebody negotiating with a supplier. You see how your colleagues respond when something goes wrong. You gradually absorb how events work. That is much harder when everyone is working independently from their spare bedrooms.

We can create training programmes. We can document processes. We can hold knowledge-sharing sessions. We can record videos and build increasingly sophisticated project management systems. All of those things are useful. But none of them completely replaces sitting near somebody who has been doing the job for twenty years and hearing how they deal with something you’ve never encountered before.

Team building

Event delivery can be stressful. There are immovable deadlines, significant amounts of money at stake and, eventually, hundreds or thousands of people arriving at a particular place expecting everything to work. When things get difficult, strong teams matter. And I don’t think strong teams are created exclusively through scheduled Teams calls, in fact I think quite the opposite.

In my opinion, they’re created through conversations about work, but also conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with work. Making a cup of tea. Going out for lunch. Asking somebody how their weekend was. Laughing about something ridiculous that happened yesterday. Knowing when a colleague is having a bad day without them having to schedule a 30-minute meeting to tell you.

Those things build relationships, and relationships build trust. None of this means that everybody needs to be in an office five days a week. I don’t think that’s the answer either. Working from home has enormous advantages. It gives people flexibility, removes unnecessary commuting, opens employment opportunities to people who don’t live within travelling distance of an office and, for some types of work, provides a much better environment in which to concentrate.

There are plenty of days when I would actively rather somebody worked from home because they have something they need to get finished without being interrupted every five minutes. The mistake, I think, is treating the debate as binary. The question shouldn’t really be where can this job be done? The better question is where can this team work most effectively? And those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

For an events business, or an organisation that runs events, I think there is enormous value in having regular time when people are physically together. Not because managers need to watch people working. Not because we don’t trust people at home. And certainly not because we’ve got an expensive office lease that somebody needs to pay for. But sometimes simply overhearing somebody say, “I think that’ll be fine” is exactly the moment somebody else needs to say: “Actually, I’m not sure it will.”