Dominic Tidy, EuRA Operations Manager, gives an overview of the EuRA Congress 2011.

By Dominic Tidey, EuRA Operations Manager

Why do people attend conferences?  Each year, after our International Relocation Congress, we send all our delegates an online evaluation examining every aspect of the event.  We get very clear feedback on the quality of the conference sessions, the networking opportunities and the venues, but what is far harder to pinpont, is the motivation for delegates to attend in the first place.

Here at EuRA (www.eura-relocation.com) we have run our International Relocation Congress for 14 years, starting in Barcelona with 125 delegates, and ending up this year, in Palma de Mallorca with 575.  Clearly we are doing something that appeals to our delegates, but pinning down a single factor is almost impossible.

One thing we learned this year, was how pivotal such events become to the relocation industry, marking out the year and providing a structure for marketing planning, vendor management and new business procurement.  Our 2010 event was cancelled as a result of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano and the subsequent closure of Europe’s airports.  Many of our delegates from the HHG industry were already stranded in Australia and Asia as a result of attending the FIDI conference in Perth and although we as a team were on-site in Palma having driven there, by Monday it became clear that we were going to be there alone!  Once the decision was taken to cancel, we received 350 e-mails in thirty minutes from delegates, relieved that we had taken the decision on their behalf.  Consequently nearly 24 months elapsed between conferences and it was very interesting talking to our delegates at other events around the world about what effect this had had on their networking.  The cancellation of the EuRA event had actually increased their costs as a result of needing to arrange partner, supplier and client meetings individually.  So one major factor for the growth in the numbers of delegates at our event is definitely cost saving.

Over the years we have structured the event to give delegates the maximum balance between industry sessions, networking time and crucially, two structured networking events.  One emphasis we have always placed on the event in response to delegate requests is holding two memorable parties.  The formal Gala Dinner enables everyone to meet, share information, enjoy a truly spectacular meal in an amazing location and catch up on the year’s business.  The final night is a full on party.  By day three, delegates have more or less met with everyone they need to see, done the business they came to achieve and are ready to party.  This year in Palma, we held our final night party in the spectacular and amazing surrounds of Galdent, a limestone cave in the mountains outside the city.   In the past we have been in a Berlin nightclub, a Copenhagen theatre, a cruise ship on the Vltava river and a palazzo in Rome. 

A conference is so much more than a purely business event, especially when there are so many cultures involved as delegates.  We had delegates from 45 countries in Palma this year, and they represented an incredibly diverse spectrum of how business is conducted.  Our keynote speaker, leading interculturalist Fons Trompenaars, is an expert at deconstructing how cultures do business.  Take Spain, our host country this year.  As a culture, the Spanish will use time, in a non-linear, less constructed way than say, the British and the Germans.  The impact that this has on business culture is the extraordinary emphasis that cultures like Spain will place on the relationship that needs to be formed before business can be done.  In this type of culture, lunch is more important than the agenda of the meeting.  In Germany and the UK, the opposite is true.  The relationship building is secondary to conducting business.  Whether we like each other is unimportant so long as we plan what we will do, stick to what has been agreed and carry out the tasks that will result in business being concluded.  Looking at these kind of cultural imperatives is central to the planning of our event as we have such cultural diversity in terms of delegates.  Striking the right balance between the formal environment that will enable business to be done and the informal social events that foster the relationship building, is pivotal in our planning and is probably one of the success factors behind the conference. 

When attending other mobility conferences around the world, it is interesting to see the different approaches that are taken according to the business culture of the country.  One of the most important dates in the relocation calendar outside Europe is the WERC Global Mobility Symposium held in a different city in the USA each October (www.werc.org).  The conference is built around an exhibition hosting hundreds of exhibitors and this is the primary networking function.  Attracting well over 1,000 delegates, the event is huge and impressive, but very different in its character to the EuRA International Relocation Congress, as it is built to facilitate an American style of doing business.  Breakfast meetings and early nights are the style, reflecting the US business culture.  This is an event to facilitate business rather than build relationships, and this is a reflection of the cultural paradigm at work in the USA.

So, why do we attend conferences?  Humans are essentially social animals, and whether we are doing business together in a boardroom or over a dinner at an industry event, we are inevitably forming and maintaining relationships.  A new theory of organisational management by Dr Elizabeth McMillan of the UK Open University Complexity Science Research Centre, takes self organising systems within nature as a starting point in examining how working in groups is essential to human nature.  Maybe it is this primal urge to work in tribes that explains our desire to meet en masse at an organised event.  And if that is the case, then like the festivals celebrated across the indigenous cultures of the world, we all just love to party!