Employee Engagement Fosters Ideas

I’m really excited to share our final guest of Season 1 of the Waves Connects Podcast. 

I had the pleasure of having an open conversation

with Ashley Roberts, General Manager of Omanexpo. I wanted to speak to an experienced organiser such as Ash to talk about our people or rather, his employees. 

Ashley is a seasoned senior event professional, with over 20 years experience in the industry, so he has learnt a thing or two about what works (and what doesn't!) with his teams.

As it's our last episode of the season, it builds a perfect stepping stone onto Season 2 for the podcast - helping listeners think about what's next. 

During his career Ashley has spent time based in the UK, United Arab Emirates and currently Oman. He has launched and grown many events across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South Asia and the Subcontinent of Asia and so has lots of experience we wanted to share for your listening pleasure.

His current role as General Manager at Omanexpo sees him heading up an ambitious and fast growing events company that operate in the Middle East.

Our conversation covered a few topics in reality, but they are useful areas for employees and organisers to think about as everyone starts to think about the future of events. 

Key take aways from this episode 

Be a good listener – you don’t have all the ideas, take the time to listen to your employees and give them a format that’s accessible for everyone. Not every employee will stick their hand up in a townhall.Be open – as the our cultures shift from working from home and splitting office and home work life balance, talk to your employees about what you expect of them or what their outcome needs to be each week. Give them micro goals if you need to, but listen to them to understand what works for them too. Be agile – In Ashley’s view, events haven’t taken digitisation far enough. Movement is being sped up because of the pandemic but we have the opportunity to really drive change for our industry and whilst it’s not a pleasant situation to be in at the moment, we will come out of this pandemic stronger. 

In summary? 

Engage with employees in any way we can. You will foster a workplace of creativity, idea sharing and ultimately, greater employee engagement. 

We hope you enjoy the episode. 

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