Ethics in the Meetings Industry

Today I attended a GaMPI meeting at the Westin Atlanta Airport. Michael Shannon, CMP, presented on “Everyday Ethics for the Meetings and Sales Professionals.” Although not exactly the most sexy topic, the presentation addressed important items that are on all our minds these days. Specifically, TARP, SOX, and of course ethics. Here are a few highlights:

-SOX has put much more scrutiny on expenses (necessary and frivolous). More people in an organization are reviewing and signing off on budgets and expenditures and planners need to be able to support and justify choices
-Keep a paper trail and document everything (even personally, I do this with everyone from my health insurance company over the phone to our roofing contractor in person. I always document date, time, who I spoke with, outcome, and anything else noteworthy. Make this a habit in your personal and professional life!)
-TARP: it is important our industry self-regulates and holds ourselves to standards vs become subject to government intervention. Be an advocate on our behalf!
-Perception is Reality – we now need to step it up by getting educated and effectively communicate on behalf of meetings and incentives
-Ethics are very important and it’s easy to overlook things or step over the line when it comes to accepting gifts, going on FAM trips, etc. Act consciously and consistently; once your reputation gets tarnished it’s hard to fix it

GaMPI Monthly Program

This afternoon I attended the monthly GaMPI (Meeting Professionals International, Georgia Chapter) meeting at the Buckhead Hotel. I was especially interested in hearing the speaker since the topic was about Work/Life Balance. I need a lot of tips on this as I have a 6-month old and a new job! Really though, I am so blessed and lucky as I have a great work/life balance since my boss and I came to a very mutually beneficial arrangement that I work about 25-30 hours per week. Andy Masters was the speaker and he was very energetic and told entertaining stories. 3 interesting items that came up randomly during his presentation:

1)The average person spends 23 hours watching television per week - WOW. I actually think my husband is one of those people. He loves television and swears that he never gets sick of it and never will.

2) This slide is awesome:

and

3) We did a fun exercise where we had to fill out items we wanted to START, DO MORE, DO LESS, and STOP doing. Here's a photo of my list.

Overall, great GaMPI program as always.