An Industry Under Pressure -

Identifying the individual stressors that event planners face is the first step to measuring the impact of stress on the industry as a whole.

“Calling all event planners!” Angelika Bazarnik posted on the PCMA community forum Catalyst. “As part of my Ph.D. research at UNLV’s Harrah College of Hospitality, I’m studying stress in the events industry — and I need your voice. If you’re an event professional, your insight is incredibly valuable. By participating in a confidential interview, focus group, or survey, you’ll help shape solutions that support a healthier, more sustainable future for our industry.”

Angelika Bazarnik

I was waist deep in Salary Survey data when I read Bazarnik’s post. It had already occurred to me that on-the-job stress — it’s a role that has landed on most-stressful jobs lists for years — could be why more than a third of event organizer respondents say they don’t think they are adequately compensated. I reached out to Bazarnik to learn if preliminary research for her dissertation could help support this connection.

“It’s always been common knowledge that event planning is very stressful,” she told me. Bazarnik has firsthand experience observing this stress over several decades, working with planners in various roles at venues, and earning the CPCE, Certified Professional in Catering and Events, designation. Five years ago, she became a planner herself, in addition to an instructor at UNLV.

Despite it being widely accepted that event planners have stressful jobs, Bazarnik said that when she started digging through the literature on the topic for her research, she couldn’t find any academic studies that backed that up. “That was a really easy answer to my question of what my dissertation is going to be,” she said. “You always want to fill a gap.”

Bazarnik’s first step was to search “stress” in industry trade publication archives over the past 40 years. “First of all, I want to say how hard it is to research stress,” she said. “The word ‘stress’ is extremely overused. Everybody is stressing about something.” Adding “events” as a keyword in her search further muddied the waters, as it brought up all kinds of events, like financial events and life events, she said. Finding the two discussed in the right context required that Bazarnik parse through some 3,000 articles, which she whittled down to 66 that were relevant.

Two of those articles were academic, Bazarnik said, including one from the University of Spain that compared stress and burnout between event planners and communication agency employees, but didn’t arrive at a major difference. “Which I feel may not be a correct way of analyzing side-by-side to professions like that, because totally different types of personalities might be joining these different careers,” she said. In addition, you’re comparing “all the people in communications and all the people in planning, but you don’t really have any people that maybe have done both.”

That’s a preference Bazarnik has for professionals she interviews for her research: She wants to talk to event planners who have had other jobs, because then they are in a better position to judge whether this is a more stressful role, she said.

In her search, she said she found a lot more about stress in the events industry published during the ’80s and ’90s than the period from 2014-2023. Part of that she attributes to the topic becoming repetitive and going over the same internal and external stressors — the things planners can control and those that are beyond their control. But, she added, digging through the literature revealed that “we hadn’t produced many solutions.”

This is where she hopes her research will make a mark — stress-mitigation strategies. “Real progress,” Bazarnik said, “comes from identifying the individual stressors we face and working to eliminate them or at least reduce their impact.”

Her “No. 1 go-to” for that, she said, is technology. It’s about “making sure, that I’m organized and I have the tools I need. I always say, sending a handyman without his toolbox would be so stressful, right? So for me, technology is really big and has been the most helpful when it comes to stress. I’ve always loved technology and working in the industry, I would kind of borrow tools from other industries to help me.”

Why So Stressed Out?

Bazarnik’s experience informs some of her research approach. “Part of the stress,” for planners, she said, is not just the pressure to drive and grow attendance, “but one little devil that sits in your mind constantly” is whether participants enjoyed themselves — and that alone “is such a huge stressor,” she said.

In her interviews with planners, she divides the planning process into stages. First is the creation/ideation stage — “trying to figure out what region, where, how, how big,” she said. “Then you have the active planning stage. Then you have the execution stage, which is pretty much from the first time you step onto the property to leaving the event. And then there’s the post-event [phase] — the ROI and the billing. And the billing, trust me, can be very stressful, very stressful.”

Even right after the meeting concludes, you would “think would a cooling-off period, but it’s not,” she said. “I found this in one of the older articles — there can be post-meeting depression. Even going to the event space after it’s broken down and there’s trash everywhere” can be a letdown. “This is when all the worries,” she said, “start kicking in about how everybody enjoyed themselves.”

Like Flying a Plane

Bazarnik thinks planners may be dissatisfied with their compensation when they compare their work with other roles that command similar salaries. “I would say I was really surprised how much McDonald’s managers make,” she said, after doing a quick Google search of salaries for meeting planners and fast-food managers, with results for both in the $60K range. “They actually make pretty good money and that is such a repetitive business,” she said. For planners, it’s like flying “a plane you’ve never flown before every year, over and over again,” she said, “vs. operating a plane with an autopilot. I think planners see what other people make in different industries, and I think that’s where the dissatisfaction comes from. They might be working 12-13 hours a day, six days a week, and they’re like, ‘I’m not being paid enough for this.’”

Bazarnik said she sees a lot of openings for meeting planners in the $60K-$70k range, while professionals in the tech industry “are making these really high salaries in project management — and event planning is project management.” Even a construction project manager doesn’t have the same deadline pressure as event organizers, she pointed out. “Let’s say the building opens one day late,” she said. “The world’s not going to fall apart. But you can’t have the event start one day late.”

Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.

On the Web

Angelika Bazarnik has created a free event toolkit to simplify event planning and execution, accessible globally on all devices, with the goal of eliminating stress and miscommunication. Learn more at EventToolkit.app.
You can sign up to participate in an interview with Bazarnik on stress at BanquetConsulting.com/phd-research-sign-up.