Duty of care for meetings and events

Most of this site is about money. This page is about something else. When an organisation asks somebody to attend a meeting — to get on a train, stay in a hotel, spend a day in a building it chose — it takes on a responsibility toward that person.

Discharging it is largely a matter of knowing things. Where people are. Whether the venue suits them. How to reach them if something happens. Almost every practical difficulty here comes back to not knowing, and not knowing is a direct consequence of how bookings are made.

Here is the test. Something happens at a hotel in a major city this afternoon — a fire, a security incident, an evacuation. Your chief executive asks whether any of the organisation’s people are there.

Where meetings are booked departmentally, that question cannot be answered. Not slowly — at all. Marketing booked a client briefing there. HR has four people on a training course. Nobody holds a list, because no list exists. The answer arrives by ringing round and hoping.

This is the clearest non-financial argument for centralisation on this site. Decentralised booking does not make the answer slow; it makes it structurally impossible, because the information was never collected anywhere it could be aggregated. No amount of diligence by individual bookers fixes that — see decentralised meetings management.

The requirement is modest: a single record of which events are running, where, when, and who is expected to attend. It does not need specialist software. It needs the information to arrive in one place — a by-product of a mandated route through meetings management, and what a meetings policy should require.

Worth deciding deliberately: how attendee lists are maintained when they change close to the event, who can access the record out of hours, and how event attendance relates to any traveller tracking already in place. The boundary is discussed on SMM vs travel management.

Choosing a venue is a duty-of-care decision as well as a commercial one, and these questions are answerable at the sourcing stage, when asking costs nothing.

Asking these consistently is a sourcing discipline. Where an agency handles venue procurement, they belong in the standard brief rather than being remembered on the good days.

Getting people to a meeting is part of the meeting. Considerations that commonly arise: whether travel is arranged or left to individuals, late arrivals and departures, transfers in unfamiliar places, and driving — particularly a long drive after a full day. The last is the most overlooked and the cheapest to address, and a programme with visibility of the schedule spots it in advance.

Events outside the home country raise further considerations: entry requirements, healthcare and insurance, local conditions, and whether the organisation has local support if something goes wrong. Many organisations already have a travel risk framework covering this; bring meetings inside it rather than building a second one.

Where destinations carry elevated risk, organisations commonly want a documented assessment and a named decision-maker before committing. That belongs in the thresholds on meetings approval process as a non-financial trigger, so a modest-value event in a difficult destination still reaches the right desk. The commercial counterpart is on meetings risk management.

Most organisations already have incident procedures. What is missing is the connection between them and the meetings programme.

Running an event well means knowing about access requirements, dietary needs and sometimes medical considerations. Collecting that is necessary. Collecting more than you need, keeping it longer than you need, or passing it to suppliers casually is a separate problem.

The habits organisations commonly adopt: ask only what is needed, be clear about why and who will see it, share with venues only the minimum — often the requirement without the name attached — and have a view on deletion afterwards. Whether that meets your obligations is for your data protection lead, as meetings compliance discusses.

None of this requires a large apparatus. It requires that meetings activity is visible in one place, that venue questions are asked consistently at sourcing, and that existing incident procedures know meetings exist. Every element above depends on information arriving somewhere it can be aggregated — the defining characteristic of a strategic meetings management programme. The duty-of-care case frequently moves people unmoved by spend analysis: see building the business case.

To be clear about our own position: we can build these questions into how venues are sourced and events recorded, because that is what an events and venue-sourcing agency does. Setting the standard your organisation must meet is for your legal, HR and health-and-safety advisers.