Hilton hires a doctor to wake up Australian meetings business

: MICEBTN Archive Stories Issue 29; Thursday, 20 September 2007

A MAJOR hotel has brought in an 'attitude doctor' after a study which highlighted factors that cause people to fall asleep during meetings.

Hilton Sydney says 6.3 million Australians (equivalent to 97 per cent of participants surveyed) admitted to nodding off due to environmental factors such as lack of light, poor seating and catering.

So it’s turned to attitude doctor, Dr Tom Mulholland, to audit and re-design its corporate meetings business, introducing new ‘software’ (mind) and ‘hardware’ (physical) tools for delegates.

New features include mid-meeting yoga sessions for up to 700 delegates and attitudinal surveys that teach ‘anti-virus’ for improving meeting dynamics.

The project is backed by omnibus research, which uncovered that Australians are switching off in meetings predominantly because of environmental factors:

• A staggering 97 per cent of people surveyed said they start snoozing when boxed inside four walls without natural light.

• 88 per cent zoned out after sitting in the one spot for too long.

• A further 62 per cent of respondents blamed poor quality catering.

Dr Mulholland is a medical doctor and full-time mentor with the Healthy Thinking Institute, teaching executives how individual accountability towards one’s attitudinal processes can create more effective organisations. While still working part-time in a busy hospital emergency department, his work records the profound influence that ‘negative thinking’ has on people, shown to be prevalent about 40 per cent of the time across a number of different work and social contexts.
Through his work with the Healthy Thinking Institute, he has coached corporate teams at Microsoft, CBA, Hilton and Hewlett Packard and other major organisations. He has a special interest in re-wiring unhealthy emotions and attitudes.

• According to Hilton Sydney, the statistics in the study relate to full and part-time Australian workers who attend meetings. Out of a total of 6,526,000 - 6.3 million said environmental factors contribute to people falling asleep in meetings.