Meetings compliance

When someone says their meetings programme has a compliance problem, they usually mean one of two things. Either people are not following the organisation’s own process, or the organisation is unsure whether its meetings activity sits comfortably within the external rules applying to it.

The first is a process-design question procurement can largely solve. The second is for specialists. Conflating them produces policies that are legalistic where they should be practical and vague where they should be precise.

Internal compliance asks a simple question: of the meetings activity that happened, how much followed the route the organisation said it should?

Most organisations cannot answer that, because it requires both a numerator and a denominator — and the denominator is all activity, including the bookings nobody mentioned. If your only record of meetings spend is what came through the official channel, your compliance rate is 100 per cent by construction.

Honest measurement starts from the finance system, not the programme. Pull the ledger and card data for a period, identify everything plausibly meetings activity by supplier type and cost centre, and compare it against what the programme recorded. The difference is your leakage.

This is unglamorous work and the most valuable thing a new programme can do in its first quarter. The method is in how to measure meetings spend; the reporting that follows is on event spend reporting.

The instinctive response to leakage is a communications campaign and a reminder from a senior sponsor. That produces a short-lived improvement and then reversion, because it treats the symptom.

In our experience of receiving briefs from organisations, people bypass a process for recognisable reasons: it is slower than the alternative, they do not know it exists, it does not cover their situation, or they tried once and the answer took a week. Only a long-standing venue relationship is about preference, and that is a preferred-supplier conversation rather than a compliance one.

Fix the design and compliance improves without enforcement. Make the route faster than ringing a hotel, publish it where people already look, make sure it handles awkward cases, and acknowledge requests the same day. That usually means revisiting the meetings approval process itself; the behavioural argument is developed in centralising meetings and events.

The areas below are ones organisations commonly need to consider in connection with meetings and events. We are describing the shape of the question, not answering it. Which apply to you, and what they require, is a matter for your own advisers.

Meetings sit close to hospitality, and most organisations already have a policy on that. The questions that recur are how entertaining of clients is authorised and recorded, the position on accepting hospitality from venues during sourcing, and how familiarisation visits are treated.

Organisations commonly want these treated consistently between the meetings policy and the anti-bribery policy, with the latter taking precedence. Your compliance function’s view on thresholds and recording should drive what the meetings policy says, not the other way round.

Running meetings generates personal data: delegate lists, contact details, dietary requirements, accessibility needs, travel itineraries, sometimes photographs. Some is straightforward; some is considerably more sensitive.

The habits organisations commonly adopt are to collect only what is needed, be clear with delegates about why, think carefully about what is shared with venues, and have a view on how long it is kept. Whether those habits satisfy your obligations is for your data protection lead — and if you do not have one, that is worth raising. Where a third party delivers events on your behalf, the data-sharing arrangement should be explicit; see our privacy policy.

Venue accessibility is both an obligation question and a quality question. The obligation side belongs with your advisers; the practical side belongs in your sourcing brief — step-free access to every space being used rather than just the entrance, accessible facilities, hearing-loop provision, and evacuation arrangements.

The recurring problem is that accessibility is checked at the point of need rather than the point of sourcing, by which time the venue is contracted. Building it into the standard brief costs nothing. This site’s own position is on the accessibility page.

Several sectors operate industry codes governing meetings, hospitality and interactions with particular audiences. Pharmaceutical and healthcare organisations are the best-known example, with codes addressing venue choice, hospitality levels and transfers of value. Financial services, legal and other professional sectors have conduct frameworks bearing on client entertaining.

We are not experts in any of these codes and do not advise on them. From a sourcing perspective, where a code applies it needs reflecting in the brief at the start, because retrofitting compliance to a contracted venue is expensive and sometimes impossible. Sector context is on the industries pages, including healthcare and pharmaceutical and financial services, from an operational standpoint only.

Organisations that are publicly funded, or receive significant grant funding, commonly operate under procurement rules affecting how venues are sourced, when competition is required, and what documentation is retained. Your procurement function will know the framework.

The point worth making is that meetings spend is frequently where those rules are least well applied, because it arrives in small pieces from departments that do not see themselves as running a procurement. The aggregate position, not the individual booking, is what matters.