After two years of a global pandemic, looking after our mental health and overall wellbeing is more important than ever. Event planners and attendees alike are increasingly discussing this topic and looking for ways to promote wellbeing at both physical and virtual events.
However, truly prioritizing health and wellness is about more than including a few exercise breaks here and there, explains Nancy Snowden, Manager, Educational Experiences at Meeting Professionals International (MPI) — it’s about building wellness into the fundamental event design and keeping it in mind every step of the way.
Prior to joining the meetings and events sector, Snowden spent many years working with nonprofit student organizations on wellness and harm reduction programs on college campuses. Her work at MPI and within the events industry includes educating meeting and events professionals on how to look at wellness at events from an integrative perspective rather than relying on standalone or one-off activations.
Snowden notes that the pandemic has prompted a lot of changes when it comes to mental health and events. “I think that as meeting professionals,” she says, “we’ve often held being stressed and overworking as a badge of honor. The pandemic has shifted people's mindsets and helped them realize that being busy and being stressed isn't necessarily what defines their job as meaningful.”
However, part of what can make it difficult to address mental health is that there is no silver bullet. In addition, Snowden explains that our society is currently experiencing a strange collision of wellness-related consumer culture and the need for true holistic lifestyle and workplace changes.
“There's a lot of misinformation out there right about how you have to buy into commodities in order to be mentally well — but owning an exercise bike doesn’t make you well,” she says. She emphasizes that it’s also important to understand that wellness has a certain level of privilege attached to it, and truly achieving mental health and wellness for all people requires recognizing those privileges and biases and coming up with solutions to overcome them.
“That's my goal,” she says. “I see events as one of those places where you can introduce these concepts to people who have never been able to experience them before for whatever reason. It's a really exciting opportunity.”
Designing events around wellness isn’t about trying to create an approach that fits everyone — it's about seamlessly integrating wellness elements throughout the event, says Snowden. “I often hear from event organizers that they’re adding something like a smoothie bar at their event. That's great, but not everybody likes smoothies, and that's a really unnecessary expense.”
Instead, a meaningful design element that organizers can incorporate is to implement a “choose your own adventure” approach to lunches. Including a speaker or an awards ceremony during lunches can be exhausting to attendees who have just spent hours learning and discussing during event sessions, but giving them the agency to decide what they need from their lunch break — whether it’s taking a grab and go mean and going back to their room to rest, or networking with people at their table — can be a game changer.
“By implementing this type of approach, you employ a few different cognitive elements,” explains Snowden. “The opportunity to have choice is huge. That increases wellbeing overall because you now feel and perceive that you are not a prisoner of your environment, but rather you have the opportunity to say and do what you want to do, even if it's in a very limited instance.”
Rushing through our meals also decreases our sense of mindfulness, she adds, and is a detriment to the culinary team that puts so much effort into food and beverage. In addition to the physical and mental wellness components, this also addresses a social wellness component by offering introverts and extroverts different options depending on how much they want to interact with others.
“By changing the way that you schedule something, you have now incorporated three different facets of wellness into your event design, and it cost you $0,” says Snowden. “It's that kind of stuff that we need to be thinking about.”
Another suggestion she shares is to think about different ways you can design spaces to better engage attendees. One particular setup that stands out from her experience involved substituting yoga balls for chairs during a meeting. “I’m always moving, and I find it so hard to engage in meaningful conversations when I've got all this energy I need to get out,” she says. “Having these yoga balls was a very cost-effective way to enhance my mental, social, and physical wellness. It wasn’t just a booth activation — it was a multifaced approach.”
The same principles apply to virtual events — Snowden recommends finding as many ways as possible to give attendees choices in how they experience the event, as long as you can execute on it well. For example, it can be valuable to give attendees an opportunity to reflect on information that they’re learning, but they may like to do so in different ways.
“Sometimes group reflection freaks people out,” notes Snowden, “and the people who don't want to participate will immediately keep themselves muted and not say a word.” They may prefer peer-to-peer reflection, or being given a video journal opportunity where they can individually record their learning reflections.
In addition, integrative wellness design isn’t limited to onsite, but should also be considered pre-event. One event that Snowden recently attended partnered with a telehealth company to offer a free hour of counseling to attendees so that they could work through any anxieties they may have about traveling and attending an event for the first time in several years. “This is a great example of a pre-event activation that betters your attendees holistically and prepares them to be able to participate fully in the event that you've created,” she says.
Whether they’re virtual or in-person, Snowden shares her hope that more events will deprioritize wellness items and commodities in favor of holistic wellness design. “I want to create experiences that are driven by the people that attend them and that are meant to enhance and elevate the people that attend them,” she says. “When we create those passive wellness activations, as I call them in my class, we're doing a disservice. We are in such a wonderfully transparent and rich professional community that we owe it to ourselves to invest in this from a larger viewpoint.”
Eventprofs who are interested in learning more about integrative wellness and event design can check out MPI’s Event Wellness Design course and their wellbeing resource center.