The first project that the HR Manager decided to give me was about the whole organisation of an event dedicated to some employees. More precisely, I was asked to organise a reward ceremony to recompense employees who did not take sick leave during the year 2009.
I must say that I was pretty stressed to have this responsibility as I never organised an event before except small events for myself. It was quite a challenge for me and I didn’t really know where I should start so I began asking question to my colleagues at the HR department. They gave me some clues of what should be included in this kind of events and I started writing an action plan including all the tasks I had to do to successfully organise the reward ceremony.
I understood that one of the most important aspects of an event was to delegate the different tasks to the appropriate people and to keep communicating with them throughout all the process. For example, the HR department was taking care of the design and distribution of invitations, the F&B Manager was taking care of the menu and the set-up, and the entertainment program was organised by the entertainment team. I had two weeks to prepare the ceremony and as the hotel was used to this kind of events it was pretty is to have things done correctly most of the time.
I say most of the time because one mistake happened and it was this mistake came from my colleagues of the HR department and me! What happened is that the event was supposed to be held on Wednesday 14th in a first time and then we decided to do it on Friday 16th for some reasons. The thing is that on the invitations I designed in a first time it was written Wednesday 14th and when we changed the date we only replaced the 14th by 16th and forgot to replace the Wednesday by Friday. My colleagues printed out about 70 invitations on Saturday and on Monday we had already distributed all the invitations. One of my colleagues discovered the mistake as soon as we finished the distributions! What happened next? We decided to all take the responsibility for the mistake and not trying to find who the culprit was. We collected all the invitations, printed out new ones with the good date and gave them back in less than an hour. It was a real team work and I really enjoyed it!
2 comments:
I've organised a lot of events in my time (mostly gigs and music festivals) and I know how nerve-wracking it can be. Looks like you handled it especially well for your first time. Good work!
I think you handled it well also! Making sure you rectify a mistake as soon as possible is the best thing you could have done. Even though you have never organised an 'event' before, I find you can draw on the events you have organised socially to assist you. Having people in the organisation who are willing to help you out is great! You can learn a lot from them i'm sure.
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