Supporting Players

At BlueCross and BlueShield of Florida, Kathleen Zwart, CMP (center), aims to train some 1,000 assistants who plan meetings. Among those who appreciate her efforts: Judy McCray (left) and Katrina Jones.

Kathleen Zwart, CMP, is one of a handful of dedicated meeting planners at health-care giant BlueCross and BlueShield of Florida. But she estimates there are at least 1,000 administrative assistants involved with planning meetings at the organization’s sprawling Jacksonville campus. Her goal, she says, is to find them and teach them as much as she can, in the interest of controlling meeting costs.
    “I used to work in hotel sales,” says Zwart, “and my best calls were the ones where an assistant would call up and say, ‘Hi, I’ve got $5,000 to spend on this meeting for 100 people. Can you help me?’ You bet I helped them I helped them spend it all. I want to arm our admins with the right terminology and knowledge before they make that call.”
    BlueCross and BlueShield of Florida is not an anomaly. Corporate vigilance, which demands adherence to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of July 2002 and the continued emphasis on controlling all areas of spend, has drawn attention to  meetings. In some cases, it has even fueled the creation of a formal meetings policy.
    A recent study by Northcross, Ga.-based Windward Marketing Group of 20 U.S. firms with an average annual meeting spend of $19 million found 42 percent intend to create a meetings policy, with 20 percent citing “reduced exposure to financial and security risk” as the reason.
In many companies today, administrative assistants have evolved into de facto meeting planners for their immediate bosses. A quick sales meeting here, an employee-of-the-month awards dinner there, a client pitch they have become convenient go-tos for managers who already rely on them for daily administrative support. 
    There is no question they provide a valuable service, says Zwart, particularly for companies such as BlueCross and BlueShield of Florida, where she acknowledges the meetings department is “definitely understaffed.” But they also can be an obstacle that cannot be ignored when it comes to creating a realistic meetings policy, company-enforced or not.
    “When admins plan meetings, there really aren’t any guidelines. They only need approval to get the final invoices paid,” notes Zwart. “We want to control costs and show savings. To make any kind of policy work, I need the assistants to want the same things. And I’m going to have to show them why.”
    To get admin buy-in, the first step is to find the assistants who are planning meetings; the second is to convince them why they have to do things differently. And if there is no company-enforced meetings policy, be prepared for opposition. “Basically, you have to build a business case and present it just like you would to a potential customer,” says Michele Snock, CMM, manager of global meeting services for San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems. 
    Effective steps for bringing these important players into the fold include the following.

Find and teach  
In January 2005, Tenet Healthcare Corp. moved its headquarters from Santa Barbara, Calif., to Dallas. Many employees chose not to relocate, including several members of the in-house meeting planning team. Peg Wolschon, CMP, manager of meeting services, and her team of two saw the move as an opportunity to start fresh and set about creating a meetings policy. 
    To find out which administrative assistants were involved in the process, they turned to the company’s in-house travel department, which proved a valuable resource.
    “Whenever a call comes in requesting air travel to a meeting, they alert us as to who placed the call,” says Wolschon. “We then call that person and tell him or her about our meetings policy and ask how we can help.” 
    Wolschon estimates there are at least 150 administrative assistants in her building alone. Considering that Tenet has 70 additional offices around the country, an awful lot of unaccounted-for assistants are planning meetings. 
    The human resources department at BlueCross and BlueShield of Florida was Zwart’s first contact, and it likewise proved a tremendous agent of support. After putting together a series of educational sessions on planning, drawn from her 20 years of experience, Zwart approached the HR department and pitched her idea. HR then packaged and posted the courses on the company’s learning and development website, and then directly targeted those assistants who had been identified in the company’s records as having involvement in meetings, alerting them by e-mail of the new educational offerings. 
    To kick off her educational program, Zwart created a mini trade show on company premises, featuring representatives from 25 local hotels, meeting venues and convention and visitor bureaus, including Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville and St. Augustine, as exhibitors.
    “I learned that very few people know what a CVB is and what they can do for you without cost,” says Zwart, who for the past four years has hosted classes on topics such as site inspection, menu planning and negotiating with suppliers. Today, at least 15 assistants attend the monthly sessions, which often fill to standing-room-only capacity.
    “By offering these classes, I have been able to reach the admins,” says Zwart. “From the attendance, I have created a database of admins to whom I now regularly reach out.”

Start at the top
Even if the company already has a well-established meetings policy, getting assistant buy-in is no cakewalk, especially if the policy is not enforced. Keep in mind that executive assistants to CEOs wield considerable power within the corporate structure. They are both a source of information and a role model for the more junior administrative assistants who aspire to one day fill their shoes.
    “These are the people who will be your advocates, not their bosses,” says Michele Snock, whose meetings department of 16, including five planners and 10 logistic support people, was created eight years ago. “Use them, because once you have their buy-in, the junior admins will follow their lead.”
    At Tenet, Peg Wolschon created a meetings manual that she initially distributed to participants at a session explaining the direction her department wanted to take. It contains a copy of the meetings policy Wolschon developed and outlines the services the meetings department provides in areas such as contracting, site selection, transportation and budgeting. The manual has proved a huge success.
    “What we were really saying was, ‘We will help you with all the boring details, but you can still take the credit,’” says Wolschon.

Emphasize empowerment
From an administrative assistant’s point of view, planning a meeting is a perk, something out of the ordinary from the day-to-day grind of paperwork. They get to tour a hotel, plan a menu and have people charm them for their business. In short, they get to be the boss. 
    To get assistants to change how they plan meetings, don’t talk about what they will have to give up. Instead, emphasize what role they will play in the process, sources advise. “Assure them that they still have the freedom to do the part of the job they like, such as menu planning. It’s just that they must now follow the guidelines you are setting down,” says Kathleen Zwart.
    Snock refers to her approach as “controlled empowerment.” She puts in place certain controls, and the assistants are free to make choices within those parameters; compliance is tricky, however, as Cisco Systems’ official meetings policy is not mandated.
    In fact, when Snock approached her company’s CEO on endorsing a mandated policy to force compliance by administrative assistants and ultimately make tracking meeting spend easier, the answer was a definitive no. 
    In Snock’s case, “what did eventually help me was when accounts payable shut [the assistants] out,” she says. Two years ago, inundated with hundreds of invoices from hotels and meeting suppliers and tired of tracking down approvals, Cisco’s accounting division turned to Snock for assistance. “They said, ‘We have all these bills coming in, and it’s a real pain. It’s slowing us down.’ I said. ‘Tell the admins no. And tell them to come to me.’”
    Rejected invoices in hand, the assistants quickly made their way to Snock’s office, where they were instructed on how to write up their meeting request based on the meetings policy and then obtain budget authorization from her department.
    “Once they know what they have to do to get paid, they come back to us,” says Snock.

Positions of Power

Today’s admins are nothing like secretaries of yore, says Joan Rhoads-Alexander, a high-ranking administrative assistant for GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate IT division. This Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical giant outsources the majority of its meetings, particularly large sales events and incentives. Rhoads-Alexander and her administrative assistant colleagues are responsible for planning and executing several high-level international meetings each year for senior executives.
    “We work closely with senior management, and we are relied on for so much,” notes Rhoads-Alexander. “We know what they like to eat, what hotels they prefer and what airplane seat they want. That’s something I can’t teach a third-party planner, and that’s why they trust us to plan the meeting.”




 

Team player: Judy McCray

    Judy McCray is an admin in BlueCross and BlueShield of Florida’s State Account Operations, a 164-person division in Jacksonville that provides insurance for state employees. It’s also the same group for which she plans training sessions several times a year. “Because management’s expectation of me went up when I started planning meetings, I’m always looking for anything that will help me developmentally,” says McCray, who began attending internal classes taught by one of the company’s senior meeting planners, Kathleen Zwart, CMP, in 2003. The topic: how to stretch a meeting budget.


Team player: Katrina Jones

    For Katrina Jones, administrative assistant in BlueCross and BlueShield of Florida’s National Account Operations, Zwart’s classes are a tremendous resource. But what she values most is knowing she can call directly on Zwart for help. 
    “Kathleen lets us tap her for information, knowledge and experience,” says Jones. “That has really given me confidence. I go in now with cards in hand. I throw her name out there real quick, and you can see the gears change.” 
    For Zwart’s own part, the possibilities of reaching all of BlueCross and BlueShield of Florida’s administrative assistants are rife with endless potential. “It’s baby steps right now,” she says. “But my goal for 2006 is a company website dedicated to meeting planning. It will have checklists and standardized forms and be a one-stop resource for every admin in this company.” -- C.A.S.

Seek feedback
For any program to really work, compliance is a necessity. But if administrative assistants discover the controls and guidelines they are expected to follow make their jobs more complicated or difficult, they’ll promptly abdicate and take others with them. Before this happens, and for myriad other reasons, it’s important to find out what they think of the system.
    Earlier this year at Cisco, Snock sent out a survey to all assistants, in which they were asked for input on various aspects of the company’s meetings policy what worked, what didn’t and what could be improved upon. The survey also asked if the respondent was interested in being part of a focus group to discuss the results.
    Another motive: Snock is considering charging internal customers for the meeting department’s services. Alerting the assistants to this, she says, “is a good way to find out what they want to handle, what logistics they are willing to do,” she says. “That helps me know what they are willing to pay for.” 
    However, Snock adds, her department wants to hold onto certain cards. “We won’t charge them for sourcing a meeting or budget approvals, because we want them to come to us for that,” she explains, adding, “Asking for their feedback shows that we are working on a common cause. We are telling them we want their input they are the customers and we want our program run the right way.”
    Snock says when the results are in, she will pick 40 of the most vocal assistants to be part of an off-site focus group, because she knows they will be able to help the less experienced and more timid assistants down the line. 
    A key component of the survey: The assistants are being asked to give their opinions on a restructuring of the global meetings department itself, which will allow it to charge other departments for planning assistance.

Praise liberally
Everyone likes to know when their work is appreciated, and that includes administrative assistants. When their cooperation results in savings, tell them so. “We just finished a large meeting for upper management and saved $60,000 on airfare by creating zone fares,” says Tenet’s Wolschon. “Our admin got to see how much her individual meeting saved the company’s bottom line, and that went a long way in reinforcing her commitment to working with my department.”