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Show 304 Meetings Podcast Incentive Research Foundation, Convene Salary Survey, 3 Ways to be more Productive
1-Editors Sue Pelletier and Barbara Scofidio from MeetingsNet
Segment Title: What happened at the Incentive Research Foundation Invitational?
Discussion what happened down in Mexico at Incentive Research Foundation Invitational. They share some tips from the educational day. (Bonus nice bird sounds in the background)
Big Data
Millennials, Baby Boomers how do you plan for generations.
Google Glass
Writing with right hand or left hand and be an animal. (Dominate brain functions)
Seating designs
Segment title: What Are You Worth?
The all-time most-read Convene article on pcma.org is always the annual salary survey. Which makes sense. Meeting professionals want to know what their colleagues are making and if they are being compensated fairly. Convene Editor in Chief Michelle Russell has been told many times that this salary survey has been used by many meeting planners to negotiate for a raise. In this segment, she talks about some of the results of the survey, as well as provides strategies for salary negotiations for women. Because even though women dominate the meetings industry, they struggle with the same challenges as women in the overall workplace in terms of perception, pay inequity, and differences in negotiating styles.
Mike McAllen from AVforPlanners.com
Mike shares 3 Tips on being more Productive
1) To-do Lists
2) Don’t think about time. Think about productivity
3) Stop Working.
Mike will be at InfoCom next week and would love to connect to listeners. Call /text him at 925 699 3190 or Email him @ MeetingsPodcast@gmail.com
Thanks to IMEX America and of course AVforPlanners.com
Transcripts:
Mike: Welcome back to the meetings podcast this is Mike McAllen from Grass Shack Events and Media my production company which I have had for about 10 years and also from AV for Planners a great place to go and get audio visual and labor for your meetings, saving some time and money using AV for planners, the podcast here is for meetings and event’s organizers who want to produce engaging programs for their attendees plus to empower organizers with new tips and resources to take their careers to the next level, you can find links and transcripts on the Meetings Podcast website.
So thank you, thank you for joining us again we have a great show today, today we have a couple of segments the first one is with Sue Pelletier and Barbara Scofidio they are from Meetings Net and they have some great information coming from the Incentive Research Foundation Invitational that happened in Mexico recently, some of you may know that Lynn Randal also a segment producer is heavily involved in that she has a big role on that. But Sue came back; Sue and Barbara are going to talk a little bit about what happened down there. Sounds like they had some great talks, some talks about big data, all kinds of things I will let you hear about them. But I really enjoyed it I think there are some great tips and stuff to listen in on for your own meetings.
And then next up we have Michelle Russell who is the Editor in Chief of Convene Magazine. And as you know convene is the magazine of PCMA and she has served in this capacity for more than 11 years and she is going to be talking today a little bit about what her segments, called this “what are you worth?” and the all time most read convene article on pcma.org is the annual salary survey which makes sense, meeting professionals want to know what their colleagues are making and if they are being compensated fairly. Convene has been told many times that this salary survey had been used by many meeting planners to negotiate for a raise which is very helpful for you listeners so make sure you go read that article in convene. Michelle is going to talk a little bit about it, she is going to talk about the results and talk about some strategies for salary negotiations for women in particular because even though women dominate the meetings industry, they struggle with the same challenges as women in the overall workplace in terms of perception, pay, inequality and the differences in negotiating styles. So that is a good one and I enjoyed listening to it and I am not a woman but I really enjoyed it and I think it is a very, very great for you to listen to so check out that.
Last but not least we are going to have Mike McAllen, strange man that he is, give you 3 ways to be more productive, so let’s get into it and let’s get right in to hear what Sue and Barbara have to say.
Sue: Hallo, my name is Sue Pelletier I am an editor with Meetings Net and I wanted to talk a little bit about some things that I have learnt from the Incentive Research Foundation Invitational meeting that was held last week in Los Cabo Mexico it was great and I am pretty new to incentives so it was very eye opening for me to meet all these great people and see what they do for a living and get a few tips on things that they were talking about during the education day. Just a few quick tips that they came up with, there is one from a guy named Dylan Bolden he is with Boston Consulting Group and he was talking about travel consumers in today’s digital world and one of his big tips was to really think at least 3 years out when you are investing in what you do digitally, like 3 years from now things are like arduous rift to that cooler virtual thing is coming and is soon going to be in the market how will that change things particularly for incentives if say you could send people a virtual reality tour of the trip where they are going to be, how will that change how people will feel about the trip, will that make them more excited for travel incentive, does it take the edge up? These are all things we need to think about. Another thing that came about the education day is from Stephen Nold who is a founder of Tech Society and President of SEN partners, he gave a presentation about big data and how we really need to start using big data in plenty of meetings and incentives. It is a little tough to get wrap your mind around it, big data is big and scary but it doesn’t necessarily have to be you can harness the analytics from things that you are already doing like look at your social media, what are people talking about there, look at the analytics from your own meeting website, you can look at your registration page, you can look data from your meeting apps there is all kinds of information available to you right now that you can sort of compile and put together and analyze and make some informed decisions about how you move your meeting forward.
Barbara: Sue, great beginning, my name is Barbara Scofidio and I am also an editor at Meetings Net we are both kind of add a little of our own commentary to some of these observations so I am going to back up to Dylan for a moment and think about where we were 3 years ago, I would say one of the hottest development right now is Google Glass, did that even exist 3 years ago? There is a real need to position yourself in the future regularly because some of our already existing forms of social media might not be proving to be as useful as we thought in our industry, I think Pinterest for example has been a wonderful tool for the event industry but I am not finding a whole lot of the incentive companies or meeting managers who are using it. That is just one example and now with Instagram, God I wonder who is using Pinterest! So it is always really important to be looking towards the future.
Stephen Nold his observation was right on and you know I love the expression “data is the new oil” which I think is so true. We did a session at PCMA in January in Boston and one of the observations made by Rick Binford who is with Lanyard is how to deal with integrating newer incentive manage and meeting management data from your meeting management software into your CRM data and getting a better understanding of how customers and sales people are being affected after a meeting and the results of a meeting are more apparent by doing that kind of thing. You really can track customer actions from before meeting starts to long after it is over and see if they were influenced for example maybe by a product rollout or something like that. Do you want to talk about Roger a bit?
Sue: Yes, he is Chief Research Officer Roger Stotz with the IRF and he talked a lot about some transit their research has come up with and one of them of course was about millennials that they are very, very different than with baby boomers are and their incentives are going to have to be a little bit different too. One thing that he said that I found a little odd he said that baby boomers generally want experiences that are more comfortable and relaxed, they want more time with their friends and family, they want more time doing some conventional activities whereas the millennials are really looking for things that are rare and unique and adventurous. I don’t know if I entirely agree with that but that would definitely change the way you are thinking about your incentive programs and how you structure them for different generations and he also was saying that they may having grown up in a more virtual environment that they may question the value of face to face meetings and incentives more than older generations have in the past so you may have to really think a little bit more about how you structure to be appealing to them and how you really provide that adventurous experience is going to draw them to a meeting and it was interesting they did one poll of the audience and 67% of the audience that was there at the education day at IRF said they were developing programs specifically for millennials which I thought was kind of interesting.
Barbara: You know it is the first time ever that we have had four generations in the workforce at the same time and we really need to give that a lot of thought in our programming but also even in our incentive and travel management I was recently on the phone with Kevin Ewamoto who is really knowledgeable on this topic and in fact is going to be doing a regular column for our interactive tabloid magazine and Kevin was saying that travel management even the software, the interface you’ve got to think about setting up something that isn’t so starchy and that is interactive and interesting these are people who have grown up with the internet and just grown up with websites in front of them every day of their lives.
Sue: Yeah it is going to be a challenge I think for all of us to think a little bit differently I kind of say one thing that we did right before we broke for lunch that day was we were going to go and talk about if we are starting from scratch and there was no incentive industry at all how would we build it, what would we do differently? So that was kind of a challenge for lunch and to launch ourselves and to really get us in the brainstorming mode they brought in other speaker facilitator named Bill Donius and he asked this question first to write down if we were some kind of animal, what animal would we be? And we were like alright, whatever, but we did it and I would say probably 85% of the people in the room said that they either would be a dog, a cat or a bird. And he said okay now take your pen in your non dominant hand and write down what animal you would be and the answers were a lot different, much more variety, much more exotic. Things came out and he said well do that while you are brainstorming what you think the future of the industry would be if you could start from scratch but think using your non dominant hand which will trigger your other side of your brain and really help brainstorm and really shake you lose and break out of the box which I thought was a pretty neat little tip and I have tried a few times since and it still works, so that is pretty interesting.
Barbara: We are all getting so creative with our meetings in a way that I think we are going to have to continue to being that we have never been before and if you think about it some of the greatest learning that goes on at a meeting goes on in the hallways, it goes on during the breaks, at the meals, during the team building. Meetings large convention planners are aware of this they are creating a lot of pads and a lot of interesting places where people can do short brainstorms or short education sessions. Room design is more important than ever, creating a room design that stimulates the senses that gets people thinking outside of the box you cannot lineup chairs in a row and do meetings with someone talking down to an audience, it is and should be history. So on that note we have covered some of the top trends from the IRF invitation, I am so sorry I missed it this year but Sue told me it was better than ever, so what animal would you be Sue?
Sue: Well I was a little weird I am the first one with my right hand I was a mythical beast both times the first time with my right hand I was a griffin and the second time I was a phoenix so I didn’t really move that much for me but I did notice it really moved a lot for other people.
Barbara: And on that note thank you for joining us we will see you at the next podcast.
Michelle: Hi Mike and everyone who is listening, I am Michelle Russell editor in chief of convene magazine. So our June issue is out and features convene always anticipated annual salary survey for meeting professionals and I will just get right to the good news. 77% of our more than 370 respondents who ran the gamut from association to corporate independent planners received a raise and pay within the last year. Unfortunately it was significantly less than the average pay raise they have received in last year survey, 3.66% compared to 9.4% in 2013 and one might speculate the reason for that is that there was an adjustment that had been there to be made considering that we had just come out of the great recession. So that could account for it being a more normal level increase in pay compared to the prior year. The average salary for all respondents was $75,882 and for those with the CMP the average was $81,515 compared to $71,042 for those without a CMP so the CMP does make a difference. And as we have seen in our last few surveys since we started to break out the data this way, despite the fact that respondents for overwhelmingly and that is 90% female than men who responded to our survey make on average $102,222 compared to a woman’s average annual salary of $72,880 and there are many reasons for this especially it seems that more executive level men take the survey than women so we aren’t saying that this is a complete easy comparison that the men are in the same experience level and bracket as women, however it did lead us at convene to explore a larger issue in the workplace that continues to be a reality and that is women still make 77 cents to every man’s dollar at work.
So in our June issue we included an interview with Lilly Ledbetter who has become the national spokesperson for equal pay and in our cover story we explore some of the things that might be holding women back at work even in the meetings industry where women hold most of the jobs from a lack of mentorship opportunities to a pervasive lack of self confidence to how they negotiate for a raise. And while we scour the latest research books in thinking about these subjects we know there are no easy answers but there are a few strategies that women can take in order to negotiate for a higher salary and those are take away I am happy to share.
The first is a shameless self promotion plug which is to check out or latest salary survey at pcma.org/convene to see what your colleagues are earning by experience level and title; you need to have a baseline to know what you are worth. The 2nd is to think about negotiating differently because as John C. Williams and Rachel Dempsey write in “what works for women at work” there is some penalty at some level imposed on women for self promotion. So when negotiating for themselves women hold back and several studies have shown that women make better negotiators when they are negotiating on other people’s behalf than on their own. So Maggie Neil of the Stanford Business School told NPR that women can use this ability to fight for others for their own needs. When you are negotiating for a raise she says, think of other people your salary supports to make it seem at least in your own mind that it isn’t all about you. Neil also said to approach salary negotiations not from the perspective of getting ready to do battle but as solving a problem.
Gender equity experts interviewed in the New York Times recently offered some other strategies they include prepare, keep a record of positive feedback you receive as well as quantifiable contributions you have made. 2nd gather supporting numbers, it isn’t easy to find out what others are earning unless you happen to have the convene salary survey but the times article suggests seeking out a recruiter to find out what you are worth on the open market even if you have no intention of leaving your current organization. 3rd frame your request from your employer’s point of view; pay attention to the things your employer values. 4th negotiate in person, email can backfire and 5th don’t use another offer as leverage, in other words if you have received another offer from another organization that tactic when taken by a woman can be perceived as a threat.
Linda C, Babcock who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and founder of Gender Equity Program told the times that it is best to approach the situation like a dialogue, “hey there is something I really want to talk about, I want to stay here, is there a way to make this happen for me?” is a better approach than saying I have gotten another job offer and leaving it up to the employer to try to match it. And the last thing finally is practice, role playing the negotiation situation with a friend or partner should help you boost your confidence.
That is it for me thanks for listening until next time I am Michelle Russell at Convene.
Mike: Thank you Michelle, so what I am going to do now is give you 3 ways to be more productive. As we created the avforplanners.com to help planners and organizers we wanted them to save time and money by kind of demystifying the AV and labor charges that you get and I wanted to give you some ways that you could be more productive with that extra time because you want to try and use your time more productively so here are some things that I have.
First off is a to do list, I am the king of to do list so I have a few of them here on my desk and what you want to do to make that to do list work is have a separate list when you start the day to choose the most important ones on your list that you might have to do you know you have to work hard to get it done so those are the ones you want to do. You want to move the minor ones off the list until you finish those most important ones then you could hit the minor ones but make sure you figure out which ones are the ones that are the most important and put those on a list and then work off with that list. Another thing is to do your list the night before or maybe at the end of the day rewrite your new list, which is what I do. That way you can get it out of your head and you can go back to your family and the rest of your life and have a good positive work-life balance that is what I strive for.
The 2nd thing is; don’t think about what you are doing as in time like how many hours you have to put in to make it work. Think more about productivity, so what do you want to get done? That is what you should really be striving for. A good way to do that is to breakdown tasks, break them down into little sections and then you can complete it and then it makes it less overwhelming, I know for like even the podcast here I have separate tasks to work with the segment producers, to edit it, to boost it, there is people involved in that way and I kind of have it broken down like okay I need to do this first, I need to do this 2nd, I need to do this 3rd and then it is done. A great thing about that too is to make a finished list, I know you probably haven’t heard of that before but make a finished list. So actually instead of just crossing out the things make a separate list to write down what you actually did that day and if you have a little booklet like a little spiral notebook you can start putting the days in and start writing in what you got on those days and then you look back on that thing it is a really good feeling truly to see what you have accomplished.
The 3rd one that I have stop working that is really important I have kind of been in this business for a long time and I would work through, just work, work, work but you need to spend time stopping. So make sure you have a firm cut off time and be sure to stop it is really important. I know sometimes when we are on bed we think of what is coming the next day but this isn’t possible but in your regular day to day, week to week work life try and make sure you set a time. So a good way to do that is to have stuff planned for after work so like for example today my wife and I have plans to throw the bikes in the back of my truck and we are going to ride our bikes across the new bay bridge in San Francisco here in Oakland to the treasure island and then back and it is a really nice ride but that is what we are planning to do. So I want to make sure you have a switch off, you want to switch off and then live your life. So have a routine if you do have to work. Another thing that I do just pretty religiously I walk my dog in the morning and in the evening and that walk he and I can talk about work, you can kind of get your mind set and at the end of the day you can kind of go for things in your head and let it go.
So those are my 3 things I hope they are helpful there are 3 ways to be more productive. So thank you and that is my segment.
Okay I really want to thank Barbara and Sue from Meetings Net they are both fantastic people and make sure you go check out the Meetings Net website, also if you have a tablet make sure to download their very, very cool app that they have and they put their issues out on there and a lot of them are very interactive it is very fun, it is a very cool way to see the future that is the way of magazines I think coming up or maybe they aren’t called magazines but such a new way to get your content from your favorite outlet and I think they are really ahead of the game on that thank you very much for their feedback on the whole incentive research foundation invitational maybe next year I will get to go that will be fun I love to learn about all the stuff very interesting hearing about what like Dylan and Stephen had to say at the conference and I also want to thank of course Michelle Russell from Convene make sure you check out the newest Convene Magazine always great, shares some great stuff talking about women and their roles and what they are getting paid and you’ve got to make sure to lean in make sure you get enough information so you can do the right thing and make the money you want to make, get that salary up kind of an uptight doing that having the information and going in and asking for what you want so make sure you check out that convene magazine the latest one.
I want to thank our sponsors of course AV for Planners, my new company that Jon Trask and I have been working on steadily we are headed down to info com next week if you are going to info com please contact me I am going to be going down to the downtown area again too, the downtown project, Tony Hsieh’s area down there the whole tech area down there is a big booming place and I like to stay down there and meet all the people down there too so info com and downtown Las Vegas so I want to also thank IMEX, IMEX America is coming up in October and we will be there also if you are going to be there make sure you come and check out our AV for planners booth or if you want just call me up, tweet me up I would love to hangout, get a cup of coffee, chat, love to meet the listeners my cell phone number is 925-699-3190, send me a text or give me a call and you can always email me at mike@grassshackroad.com or Meetings Podcast email which is meetingspodcast@gmail.com and I look forward to seeing you and if not I will see you on the next podcast. So thank you to everyone and one last thing, if you have your cell phone with you and you are listening to this on your IPad, take a picture of yourself on Instagram and tag it meetings podcast, love to see the listeners when they are listening to the show even if you are sitting in your office, grab your cell phone and take a picture I just took one of myself and put it up there so look forward to seeing you, thank you again, bye, bye.