Broadsword is a corporate events agency bringing together brands and their people through corporate experiences and internal communications events, for better culture, better employee engagement, and better business performance. Discover our employee engagement services.
The Recipe: Paul Haynes, HSBC
In this edition of The Recipe, an interview series where we ask events professionals to tell us the secret ingredients to their career success (and what they like to cook when they clock off), we speak to Paul Haynes, Emerging Talent Delivery Lead – Programme & Experience at HSBC, who works closely with Broadsword to deliver a diverse range of events from graduate inductions that take place across the globe to hackathon challenges.
“Each event is designed to really drive that skills development, bring individuals together, enable them to network and then ultimately understand the business so that they can give value back”
What have been the ingredients for success in your career?
“Learning to reflect rather than react. Early on in your career, you’re so nervous about doing well and you want to be successful and you want to impress. And then when you get that experience, you break things down, you can look at it in a different light and kind of just step back. I feel so much more confident and stronger now than I did when I was that young, self-doubting individual that I used to be.
As you progress, you go through different stages and you can look at challenges in a different way and don’t always panic. You know you’ve done something similar before and can work through it.
The piece that people rarely see is all of the planning that goes in behind the scenes to put on an event. There’s so much that goes into ensuring that it runs smoothly.
What appears simple has probably started months ago and normally involves multiple stakeholders. You could be planning an event that is just for one day, but the amount of work that goes into the lead up to that, the amount of hiccups and curveballs that are thrown in, people don’t see that. They just see the finished article, which is great. And when it’s an event, that’s what you want”.
How do you keep events running smoothly?
“Things always do go wrong, so it’s how you react and deal with them that keeps events running smoothly.
Starting from the beginning, preparation is key. You’ve got to have your plans, try and think of every eventuality, and build a strong team around you, ensuring they know exactly what their role is and they’re effectively briefed.
It’s having those contingency plans, like what happens if Paul drops off the feed. It’s what you do in those scenarios rather than an ‘oh-no’ moment where you just freeze and don’t know what to do.
When the pressure is high I try and keep calm. Inside my thoughts might be going 100 miles an hour, but on the outside, keep that calm approach. I think that’s vital because once you start showing any form of panic as a leader, that rubs off on everybody else.
So you’ve got to keep that inside the pressure cooker – don’t lift the lid off of it. Don’t let the team know that you are panicking because it’s then a recipe for it just all falling apart”.
How do you measure success of an event?
“The start point to every event is aligning it to a business objective. Question why are we doing this? And if you can’t answer that question, then you basically know you’re going down the wrong track.
Once you know what the event is for, what the objectives are and how it aligns to the business, it’s then down to the planning of how do we actually make this exciting and engaging so people go away with the key messages that we want them to have baked in from the start!
In terms of how we measure that, you can do that during the event with things like polls, Q&A and breakout sessions that can help with engagement.
With each event that we plan, success means the attendees leave inspired. Ultimately, the objectives that we’ve set have been met whether that’s driving innovation, developing skills, strengthening connections, or boosting engagement.
It is difficult sometimes to gauge that success, but it’s normally in follow up surveys that we do. Aside from that, the biggest thing for me is if people are talking about the event and they have memories from the event that they talk about. Then to me, that’s a huge marker of the success of the event”.
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