COLUMN: PEOPLE MANAGEMENT
All work and no play?
Noel Reeves, managing director of Rocket Print Promotions, burns the
midnight oil writing about the work/life balance
A
s I sit in my home office, at 9pm
on a Tuesday, the irony of writing
about work/life balance is far from
lost on me. Like many, perhaps most,
people working in exhibitions, finding a
regular balance between work and life is
somewhat of an enigma.
I look in envy at friends whose careers
take a regular break every Friday at
5pm and don’t start again until Monday
morning. But would I really want that? Is
the idea of a five-day work week, two-day
weekend so ingrained in our early years
that we see anything else as an imbalance?
The notion of balance when it comes to
work and life is subjective. We all want
to do the minimum amount of work to
enable us to get the most out of life, so
perhaps the more you put in, the more you
get out. I certainly take that stance when
it comes to myself. I work hard, sometimes
for weeks without a day off in the busy
periods, which allows me to take regular
holidays in the quieter times with my
family. But can working 20 days straight
and travelling all over the country really
be balanced? Can the down times be as
good as the up times are heavy?
As an employer this is an even harder
factor to get right. As Rocketeers, we
commit to abide by our values; one of
which is commitment. Commitment to our
clients and each other. Whatever it takes
As an industry, it’s just what we have
to do. We live in a world of immovable
deadlines, short build-ups and go from
show-to-show without breaks. We are
pressured to fulfil last-minute requests,
clients making decisions later and later in
the cycle, artwork being submitted at the
11th hour.
All thinks that just put more pressure
on the preparations, resulting on longer
shifts for the ops team, production staying
late to get jobs printed in time for the
installation crews. The balance of having
enough staff to cope in the busy times and
not too many that would be a burden in
the quieter months.
We’ve often looked at ways of reducing
these issues, but the general feel from
the Rocketeers is that they accept the
importance of their role within the team
and how their actions can have a positive
impact on our client’s experience. They
like the extra money that comes with the
overtime, or the bonuses we can afford to
pay by taking on those last-minute jobs
which could be the difference between
hitting company targets or not.
It’s a far cry from the start
of my career as an organiser.
“As an industry, it’s
just what we have
to do. We live in a
world of immovable
deadlines, short
build-ups and go
from show-to-show
without breaks”
Contracting is certainly harder to balance.
It’s 20 years since I first set foot into
the world of exhibitions. I had just left
university and was planning to save
up and go to Whistler for a season of
snowboarding. I had recently qualified as
an instructor on the dry slope in Sheffield,
and I loved what I did. But I needed cash,
so moved home with my parents and got a
‘proper’ job.
Who would have thought that spending
seven hours a day, inputting data from the
hundreds of hand-filled, mail-delivered
registration cards that arrived in the post
each day would be the spark that lit the
fire on my future career?
But it wasn’t the data entry that
excited me. That came later, when I got
to experience the excitement in the run
up to showtime. The large floor plan on
the wall, scribbled with names in the
last-minute spaces, the early start to
drive up to Islington, and then the sheer
amazement of watching a little town
appear throughout the first day of the
build. It was unreal. Like nothing I have
ever seen before, and it was the start of
four
long,
hard
days on my
feet, running around, making
sure exhibitors were ok, helping to
set up the registration area, discussing the
next year’s show, getting leads, and at the
end of all that – an industry ball.
I’d never done so many hours work in
my (albeit short) life. But I loved it.
And I guess that’s how my team – and
most teams within this industry - view
it. They get to see the impact of their
hard work. The incredible feedback we
receive from our clients – even as I sit
here typing, the familiar ‘ping’ of the
Rocketeers WhatsApp group chimed with
some positive feedback received team from
a client at a breakdown and shared with
the team.
It makes it all worth while for all of
us. A sense of pride and a warm fuzzy
feeling that what we have done has helped
someone have a great experience at their
exhibition.
And so we’re back to my thoughts at
the start. Can you actually have a good
work/life balance working in exhibitions?
Well, it’s all about getting out what you
put in. If the sense of being valued and
rewarded as part of an exciting and
dynamic industry can balance with the
sheer number of hours we all have to put
in, then I guess we do have balance, just
not as others might know it.
exhibitionnews.co.uk | February 2019
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