Women In Travel Retail+

WiTR organizes workshop for Summit of the Americas that looks at the Future of Work
2022-04-16 | Summit of the Americas
The IAADFS (International Association of Airport & Duty Free Stores) invited WiTR to be one of the content providers at the conference sessions during the 2022 Summit of the Americas, by organizing a workshop session that would have broad and relevant appeal.
The session, entitled Are you ready for the future of work? featured Noella Vincent, a well-known executive coach based in Miami, who discussed some of the biggest trends happening in the workforce today – from the impact of technology to the social function of work and human productivity – all of which have been accelerating under COVID.
Vincent was joined by Jackie McDonagh, General Manager and Director of ARI North America, who discussed the changes that have taken place in ARI’s Canadian stores over the course of the pandemic, and which changes she expects will continue into the future, and Patricia Bona, Vice President of beauty distribution company Essence Corp, who approached the topic from a Human Resources perspective, and talked about some of the hidden challenges within the new work trends. Travel Markets Insider Editor & Publisher Lois Pasternak moderated the session.
Apropos for the audience, Vincent divided her talk into five “borders” to introduce ways one can pro-actively face the new workplace reality, and these borders provided a framework for the discussion.
The WiTR program was the last one on Day One of the Summit, and was attended by a surprisingly large audience. It was quite dynamic with the four of us holding a give-and-take discussion. In a very satisfying result, it seems to have generated quite a bit of discussion afterwards, with several audience members coming up throughout the next two days to say how relevant and valuable they found it. The session also received high praise from IAADFS’ Michael Payne and Rene Riedi, who is Chairman of IAADFS.
In our introduction, we explained that the session topic was an outgrowth of the WiTR webinars that began running during the pandemic.
