With 98 percent of all corporate conferences now requiring attendees to check their egos at the door, a Chicago hotel and conference center will become the first in the USA to charge for the service.
“Quite simply, we could no longer absorb the cost of checking so many egos, keeping track of them all, then getting them back to the right people,” says Nora Williston, events director of the Rollway Park Plaza on Michigan Ave.
The center will charge $25 per ego checked, starting June 1, with a discount of $20 for a company checking more than five egos.
Williston believes her clients would rather pay the fee than risk the consequences of egos being misplaced or returned to the wrong person.
And at least one CEO agrees.
“Last April we brought 100 flexibility executives to another hotel for a consensus re-structuring summit,” says Tina Morgan of Kentucky-based >TROP<. “At the end of the event, five of our attendees got the wrong egos back.”
This, she says, resulted in confusion, hurt feelings, and in one case a woman eating a food substance she was allergic to.
Morgan says she will take future conferences to Rollway Park, in large part because of the new ego-check policy. And Williston believes other businesses and organizations will also see the value, and other conference centers will soon begin to charge, too
“Egos are the most valuable commodities in business today,” she says. “A few extra bucks to handle them carefully is a pretty solid investment, wouldn’t you say?”
