Does your organization have a written ethics policy or other code of conduct?
If you do have an ethics policy or code of conduct, is it specific to your work as a meeting professional?
YES NO 27% YES 73% NO 72% 28%
when the survey landed in his e-mail inbox. Kirklen agrees with O’Neill that the groundswell of interest in ethics could be due to market forces. “With the economy the way it is,” he said, “[suppliers] are a lot freer with what they are will- ing to offer.” As a result, Kirklen and his team have taken special care to reinforce their internal ethics guidelines. Tyra Hilliard, Ph.D., J.D., CMP, a lawyer and associate
professor of meetings management at the University of Ala- bama, in Tuscaloosa, has a broader explanation for the apparent rise to prominence of professional ethics. She thinks that over the last decade, the issue has become more prevalent within U.S. culture as a whole—not just the meet- ings industry. “It’s really been building since Enron, MCI/WorldCom, all of those kinds of things in business— and now the word ‘transparency’ is no longer a buzzword, but a standard part of the business vernacular,” Hilliard said. “I think to some extent it’s just our response to greater trends within the business world.” One of those trends has been toward increased complex-
ity—which, according to Deborah Breiter, chair of the event management department at the University of Central
Respondents left an avalanche of comments in response to our ethics survey’s final question, which asked whether the meetings industry was doing fine ethically, or if there is room for reform. What follows below, and throughout this article, is a small sample of what they wrote.
“Because I am based in Canada, I don’t see ethics as being as much of a concern as in the U.S.”
Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management, has encouraged more stringent ethical guidelines than in the past. Years ago, when Breiter was a convention services manager, it wasn’t uncommon to receive some sort of tip or gift from a client at the close of a successful meeting. At the time, she said, it seemed like a “wonderful way” for a customer to say thanks for a job well done. “But that was…a long time ago,” Breiter said. “As this business has progressed from contracts or agreements being written on cocktail napkins to 20-, 30-page documents, people have gotten more aware of things that might be ethically questionable.”
It’s Getting Better All the Time? Given that the meetings industry has grown in complexity along with the rest of the business world, has there been a corresponding rise in ethical behavior? Or has increased complexity merely provided more opportunities for planners to be led astray? Simply put, do meeting professionals prac- tice good ethics today? “That’s a hard sort of generalization, but I would have to
say—if I had to give a yes-or-no answer—no,” Hilliard said. Some of that is a result of ignorance (not knowing what is and isn’t ethical), some is temptation from suppliers, and some is simple human weakness. “It always amazes me,” Hilliard said, “when…I see people that I think should know better…say, ‘Oh yeah, I would take that’ or ‘I think that’s a perfectly appropriate gift—I put in 80 hours a week, so I think it’s perfectly acceptable that I allow the hotel to upgrade me to a suite and extend it over the following weekend so my husband can stay and we can have a free vacation.’” To wit, in the comments portion of our survey, one respondent wrote: “This is a time-consuming, detail- oriented profession and we need SOME perks.” Nevertheless, Hilliard believes that professional behavior
within the meetings industry is more ethical than it was 20 years ago—although there’s room for improvement. Her