Meetings Made for Everybody

With five distinct generations currently in the American workplace, the idea of making an event that works for everyone can seem all but impossible. John Folks, CEO of Minding Your Business, an association consultancy, says associations have had difficulty adjusting to that reality, especially when it comes to connecting with younger attendees. 

“We’ve been designing events for boomers and then gradually introducing things for gen X and millennials,” he says. “But our core audience is no longer boomers—they might be 10 to 15 percent of the attendees now.” 

One common response to the need to better connect with younger attendees is to deliver shorter pieces of content.Agendas are now often filled with microlearning opportunities; “flash sessions” of 30, 20, even 10 minutes; and a greater emphasis on visual elements. Those things have their place, says Ken Holsinger, SVP, Industry Research and Insights at Freeman, an events agency. But he adds that meeting planners can err in thinking that appealing to younger attendees means simply catering to shorter attention spans. Rather, content should appeal to their practical mindset—their urge for content that is meaningful and actionable, without bells and whistles. 

Younger generations will be tolerant of more conventional one-hour meeting sessions. But they don’t want to feel misled when they enter the room: A general session stuffed with awards, victory laps, and other rituals grates against emerging professionals who want practical, persuasive speech with helpful advice. (And a big-name speaker alone won’t impress them; see sidebar.) 

Content can appeal to particular generations, Holsinger says, so long as it’s tied to the association’s understanding of attendees’ needs, not generalizations about content-length tolerance. “Is it captivating, is it interesting, is it well-delivered?” he says. “Is it well-illustrated, does it make its point, and does it leave them wanting more?” 

 A Range of Options  

Still, meetings experts agree that the age of the one-size-fits-all meeting is long past. Folks says today’s meeting agendas “need to be tailored and customized for different groups. You’ll need asynchronous agendas and 60-minute ‘sage on the stage’ sessions along with quicker, more interactive sessions.” 

Similarly, Holsinger notes that while younger generations may be more tolerant of session length than they’re given credit for, they are also more demanding when it comes to content that is clear and personalized. He notes that a social media environment that algorithmically pushes content designed to appeal to their interests means they have little patience for session descriptions that don’t say what, exactly, they’ll be learning. 

“Is it a matter of designing the content, or should we be designing the descriptions so that the audience can better self-select?” he says. “The challenge is that we don’t give them any information—in fact, we hide it from them. Content design needs to be clear, but communication about how attendees can select content needs to be clear as well.” 

Folks notes that meeting planners would do well to think not just about the design of events for the current mix of attendees, but for the rising generation of potential attendees behind them—how they consume content, what kinds of information they need, and what will give them the sense of belonging that motivates people to attend. 

“You have to think beyond, who am I serving today?” he says. “You need to ask, ‘Who do I want to be serving, or should I be serving tomorrow?’ And then design the event around the needs of those groups, right around the formats that they prefer, from an educational standpoint, a networking standpoint, and experiential standpoint.”