Avantgarde experiences

CMW speaks with Dr Lesley Anne Bleankney (pictured), the newly appointed chief people officer at the global brand experience agency, Avantgarde, about sustainability, recruitment and the issues facing the events industry As the new chief people officer, what does the events industry need to do differently to address its current recruitment and employee retention issues? The Covid-19 crisis proved how people longed for physical interaction and exchange. It’s important to focus on this existential human need to be amongst others. Organisations as a whole need to shift their perspective around cultural factors if they want to generate commitment, loyalty and effectiveness from their staff. It is time for companies to look inward and critically check their level of cultural integrity. Avantgarde has taken these steps and is aware of the market dynamics to proactively strengthening their cultural DNA. To what extent will diversity and inclusion be important to Avantgarde’s internal recruitment and people management; how will clients benefit from this? Diversity and inclusion are at the core of Avantgarde’s history and DNA. Embracing and empowering people of all walks of life makes us a better service partner to our customers, it sparks our internal level of creativity and innovation as well as boosting multi-perspectives, enabling us to deliver the best products and services. We proactively sponsor DE&I activities in our company culture, enabling and allowing all voices to surface and help Avantgarde be a place of belonging and zeitgeist. How can the events industry position itself as a leader in the global movement towards a sustainable future? We know events cause a considerable level of carbon emissions, but this doesn’t mean things to improve this can’t be done. That’s why we’ve created the Avantgarde Carbon Scorecard to track emissions across the entire value chain of a project. The tool delivers deep and fine-grained insights into what the biggest contributors to the carbon footprint are and enables you to adjust project-related emissions. This allows our clients to really monitor the emissions of events, enabling them to reach their own sustainability goals. Moreover, we also founded Green Game, a sustainability first consultancy with a focus on sport sponsorship. Made up of a team of sustainability experts and sponsorship professionals, Green Game develops new approaches to sponsoring. What do you think will be the biggest issues for event organisers over the next 12 months; what is your strategy to approach it? One of the biggest issues remains the uncertainty regarding the Covid-19 developments and implications on social restrictions that could still appear across the globe. This shakes up business plans as well as being able to plan for the foreseeable future. Another very practical issue is the difficulty of recruiting committed service staff due to large layoffs/pauses during the pandemic. At Avantgarde we were able to hold most employees during the crisis, helping increase loyalty amongst our employees.