GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Laura Capell-Abra , founder of Stress Matters , talks to Martin Fullard about the leading causes of stress among event managers
n 2019 , a survey conducted by Stress Matters revealed that 63 % of event professionals referenced a high workload as the leading cause of stress in their lives . Perhaps this won ’ t come as a surprise ; event manager is regularly cited as the fifth most stressful job in the UK , among the likes of police officer , the armed forces , firefighter and , of course , journalists .
The question is : does the events industry really look after its people ?
Everyone will have had their own personal experiences , but event management is a deadline-driven job , and anything that combines deadlines with client expectation can have a greater emotional toll on even the hardest of souls than they may otherwise expect .
Laura Capell-Abra set up Stress Matters in 2018 after realising many event professionals were experiencing similar levels of burn-out to what she had felt earlier in her career .
“ I experienced burn-out in my mid-twenties while working at an agency ,” Capell-Abra says . “ There was a dawning moment when I was laying out a budget and wrote down five job titles , and it hit me that I was going to have to do every one of those jobs . It hit me just how
Laura Capell-Abra
overworked I had been , and that I ’ d been bottling it all up .
“ It resulted in a mini-breakdown and lead me into counselling . Before too long I returned to work , starting at a new company , which was the right thing to do , but I never forgot that experience .
“ I never forgot that the industry can be tough sometimes . I thought it might be me , and that I might be too ambitious and pushed myself too hard .”
It is something that many event managers will no doubt relate to . Time and again , they find themselves victim to a stealth creep of responsibility which , by the time they have realised it , is often too late to do much about it . Often , it requires a company culture overhaul , but even then the creep of added pressures don ’ t subside . This suggests a wider look at the industry is in order . “ When I was MD at Sledge , I had a couple of colleagues take time off for stress , which brought on yet another realisation ,” she says . “ I thought I ’ d created a great work hard-play hard environment , and yet here we had two people taking time out with stress . So , I started to think more widely about the industry as a whole . www . conference-news . co . uk