There are real benefits to sending your employees to a conference. It shows your employees that you care about their personal career development. As they say, happy employees, happy life right?
Bad jokes aside, here are the top four benefits of sending your employees to a conference.
1. Learning new skills and industry norms
The most obvious reason your employees should attend a conference is learning. Given the high quality of many conferences on the market, it should be simple to find an event that provides the perfect space for your employees to thrive. Although you should be selective about the sessions you encourage your employees to attend, they should be following their interests to bring a diversity of knowledge home with them. This also promotes meaningful engagement with the sessions they attend.
2. Networking with industry leaders
Networking, networking, networking! This is one of the main reasons people send their employees to conferences, since people make valuable connections through networking. There’s an incredible amount of sharing, learning and leveraging that can happen when you send your employees to conferences.
3. Being part of the content
In the past, attending a conference didn’t have much longevity. Then along came social media, and everything changed. Today’s conferences are interconnected. When you look around the room at a conference, you will see people tweeting, recording a video, and sharing their experience with the world (all while using the conference hashtag). Even if you’re not at the conference, you can follow along on all the action. So why bother sending employees when they can watch the conference online? You should be thinking of the content they bring back. By being part of the conference buzz online, you get your business name out there, you get to be part of the media reach and your employees get exclusive access to industry leaders.
4. Sharing what they’ve learned
If you send someone to a conference and they learn, network and create content, that’s great. But, to truly make it valuable, they’ve got to bring all that back and share it with their colleagues who didn’t get to go to the conference but could benefit from the knowledge. And, having the extra responsibility of bringing something back to share encourages your team to be present and engaged during the conference.
There are so many reasons and benefits to send your employees to conferences. If you show the right support and encouragement, the conference will not only benefit the attending employees, but everyone in the workplace.