Editorial: Venturing beyond the office door

Like many people, I’ve gradually started to venture outside my home office over the past few months. In June, before the delta variant took hold in the United States, I attended an industry dinner, and I had a couple of meetings with small groups, but last month was the first time in more than 18 months that I attended an out-and-out insurance industry conference.

The Chicagoland Risk Forum attracted a couple of hundred insurance and risk management professionals to the recently restored Old Post Office in downtown Chicago — a great new venue, by the way.

Put on by the Chicago chapter of the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc., the one-day event attracted many well-known people in the local market and finished with a rooftop cocktail hour. Other than the prevalence of face masks, boxed meals and a degree of hesitancy to make too much physical contact, it was as if the old times had returned.

And like conferences held before 2020, it was a valuable event to attend. The sessions had a lot of good information, but, like all good conferences, what you heard outside of the formal meetings in conversations with other attendees was just as valuable.

It’s those unexpected, off-the-cuff discussions that we’ve all missed since COVID-19 scuttled the numerous conferences that were fixtures of the industry calendar, whether local gatherings after work or something to fly out of town to for a few days. Zoom and Teams are great, but they can’t replace chatting in person.

So, it’s good to see more and more industry events coming back, as it were, offline as we head into what used to be one of the busiest periods of the year for insurance conferences.

And the big one for many people in the sector — the annual RIMS conference — is slated to be held in San Francisco next year, after the Denver conference was canceled in 2020 and the would-be Chicago conference moved to a virtual format this year. 

Many of the events will require proof of vaccination, which will add a few wrinkles, such as whether religious and medical exemptions will be granted and, especially as international travel returns, what types of vaccines will be recognized — only those approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or will those approved in other jurisdictions, such as the AstraZeneca and Sinovac shots, also be recognized?

In addition, it remains to be seen how many of the conferences will return. Insurers and brokers saved a lot of money on travel and entertainment since the beginning of the pandemic and it shouldn’t come as a surprise if they want to retain some of those savings.

Whatever happens, it was good to be out and about again, and I for one hope to escape more often in the coming months.

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