So you might remember the old adage about displacing anger towards people:  when a family member gets angry and kicks a child, the child then kicks the dog.

Events are stressful. Emotions run high. Many event staff can get very pushy and demanding when conditions become difficult. However, the kicking dog principle applies with full strength to these situations. Many event staff who receive undeserved attack might not be able to ignore the kick they received for the rest of the day.

I speak from the perspective of an event service provider who works intimately face-to-face with participants on-site. Wherever we go, participants form long lines anxiously waiting to receive our service. Our specific services are extremely people-intensive – and if planners and coordinators don’t work with this in mind and respect this, there is something they are missing. If coordinators don’t take the time to provide support and instead make unrealistic expectations, then the service providers will react in undesirable ways to the attendees. It’s just human nature.

A couple years ago at a very large venue, I was in the mix when a front-desk person yelled at a whole team of face-to-face providers. She yelled at this team for no good reason at all – primarily because she was a bit anxious for the event. It affected the whole team, as we were then forced to put on our best faces for 15,000 people. A number of us were very impacted by this – it really did affect our ability to smile. Though we are not “ticket takers”, (they are important too) we have a much more intimate service to attendees. We could not do our jobs pretending as if this yelling did not happen. Imagine that – one person’s small decision to yell at a few people affected over 15,000 people. Though we knew her for years, we could not understand why she reacted in this way. She apologized the following year — it was a year too late.

In the last year, I have provided event services to some of the largest events in the Silicon Valley / San Francisco Bay Area. I have been servicing events for almost 20 years – and yes, I don’t see things “as they used to be”. Event staff are forgetting the team work, and are not considering their fellow staffer in their actions. At the last large event, the production team was attempting to force our trained team away from our expertise and not even asking us what is the optimum way to provide service. Newer event players should begin to respect and rely on the highly-experienced players, and not think their way is the only way.

I’m calling for event planners, event coordinators, production team members, and event staff to think through their actions and their attacking before doing it while on-site at events. Be a team player, and consider your fellow team members. Save your issues and criticisms for after the event. There are many ways to implement events, and coordinators must prepare customer-facing staff to shine at events, and to not kick the dog.