Planner Resilience: Amy Steinwand, H&R Block

How were you able to adapt during COVID-19 when the meeting and events industry got disrupted?

In March of 2020, I started a new adventure managing meetings and events for H&R Block. This new adventure quickly became an entirely new career challenge. Due to the pandemic, our meetings were completely redesigned and executed virtually, which we had not done before.

I’ve been in the industry for 25 years, so being flexible and open to change is inherent. I focused on creating meetings that delivered our content in engaging, memorable and safe formats. Through lots of research, educational sessions and teamwork, we successfully executed several events that kept our attendees informed and connected.

Collaboration with industry professionals was quite valuable as we all navigated through tricky contract cancellations & re-bookings and shared our virtual meeting learnings. Our industry has always been supportive of each other, and this pandemic further proved that.

While I had not expected to meet my new co-workers and partners virtually, we quickly got to know each other, adapted, gained new skills and had some good laughs. By leaning on our team’s strengths of being curious problem solvers, we remained resilient and successful.

This post is part of the HopSkip Planner Spotlight Series where we celebrate the extreme resilience shown by planners across the industry when navigating the turbulent waters that COVID-19 has brought to the meetings and events industry. Keep an eye out as we release more stories like this over the next few months.