As budgets tighten and executive scrutiny intensifies, internal events such as SKOs, leadership offsites, and incentive programs are being asked to justify their existence like never before. Once protected by tradition or perceived cultural value, these programs are now expected to demonstrate clear impact on alignment, performance, and behavior change.
In this exclusive interview, Jan Barthelemy, EVP, Commercial Operations at Explori shares why internal events are being challenged more heavily than external-facing ones, the outcome metrics that now matter most, and how event leaders can reposition these programs as critical performance infrastructure rather than discretionary cost centers.
Internal programmes are under more executive scrutiny than ever. From your perspective, what is driving this shift, and why are SKOs, offsites, and incentives being challenged more heavily than external-facing events?
Jan: Internal events are facing heightened scrutiny because they sit at the intersection of rising costs, constrained budgets, and growing demands for accountability. Unlike customer-facing events, their outcomes are often assumed rather than evidenced.
SKOs, offsites, and incentives are substantial investments of time, travel, and opportunity cost, yet historically they have relied on anecdote, energy in the room, or lagging commercial results to justify spend. At the same time, executive teams are under pressure to link every major investment to strategic priorities such as revenue growth, retention, productivity, and alignment.
Internal events are now being challenged precisely because they are so critical to performance, not because they are expendable. The risk is no longer overspending. It is continuing to invest without understanding what is working, what is not, and how these programs materially influence behavior. In that context, not measuring impact is becoming the greater risk.
When budgets tighten it can be harder for leaders to articulate the value of internal events. What would you say are the non-negotiable outcome metrics that organisations should be measuring to demonstrate real behavior change?
Jan: When budgets tighten, the question leaders are really asking is whether the time and attention invested in internal events is genuinely worth it. As a result, the most effective measurement goes well beyond satisfaction and focuses on value for time, intent, alignment, and action.
Value for time is a critical, non-negotiable metric for internal events because colleagues are making a significant personal investment to attend. When this is measured well, response rates are typically very high, as attendees actively want the opportunity to reflect on whether the event justified the time they spent away from customers, teams, and day-to-day responsibilities.
Beyond value for time, organizations must measure attitudinal outcomes such as clarity of strategic objectives, confidence in leadership direction, and understanding of how individual roles contribute to company goals. These measures should not be generic. The most powerful insights come when attitudinal questions are deliberately tailored to what the organization wants colleagues to think and feel as a result of the event.
These must then be paired with behavioral indicators: intent to apply learning, collaborate differently, adopt new frameworks or tools, and change ways of working post-event. Again, these behaviors should be explicitly aligned to the outcomes the event was designed to drive.
Increasingly, organizations are also recognizing the importance of brand advocacy, typically measured through Net Promoter Score, as a critical complement to these measures. Gallup’s long-running research into employee engagement consistently shows that employees who would recommend their organization as a place to work are more productive, more loyal, and significantly less likely to leave, making advocacy a powerful leading indicator of retention and employer brand strength.
When combined, value for time, attitudinal alignment, behavioral intent, and advocacy provide a far more credible picture of impact than engagement scores alone. Crucially, these measures should be benchmarked year-on-year and across internal programs to track momentum or decline.
Behavior change rarely happens instantly, but without capturing these leading indicators, organizations are left waiting for lagging outcomes that are influenced by many variables.
Measurement creates early intelligence, allowing leaders to intervene, optimize, and course-correct while it still matters.
How do you suggest event leaders reshape conversations with the C-suite to defend spend, and reposition these programs as strategic levers, rather than cost centers?
Jan: Event leaders need to shift executive conversations from defending budgets to managing risk and performance. The question is no longer “Was it worth it?” but “What evidence do we have that this investment is driving the behaviors our strategy depends on?” This requires reframing internal events as performance infrastructure rather than engagement activities.
By presenting data that links events to alignment, confidence, collaboration, and execution readiness, leaders can show how these programs reduce risk ahead of critical commercial periods.
Consistent measurement also enables more strategic conversations about optimization, including what to scale, what to change, and where to reallocate spend. When executives are shown clear trends, benchmarks, and insights, internal events move out of discretionary spend territory and into the same category as other strategic enablers.
Measurement becomes the mechanism that earns trust, not an afterthought to justify cost.
In your experience, what are the most common mistakes companies make when trying to measure the success of SKOs and internal programs? What should they be doing differently?
Jan: One of the most common mistakes is treating internal event measurement as a post-event tick box, owned solely by event planners rather than the wider leadership team.
Too often, surveys are designed in isolation and skew toward tactical, hygiene-level questions (e.g., venue, food, logistics) because these sit closest to the planner’s role and responsibilities. While these elements matter, they rarely provide the strategic insight senior stakeholders are looking for when scrutinizing investment.
Event leaders should be closely involved in defining success upfront and aligning with senior stakeholders on the outcomes and KPIs that matter most to the business. This typically means prioritizing advocacy, alignment, and behavioral intent, rather than operational satisfaction alone.
Another frequent issue is inconsistency: different questions, scales, and objectives for each event, making it impossible to compare performance or learn over time. Organizations also often attempt to force direct revenue attribution, which can undermine credibility when the link is indirect.
Just as importantly, organizations often fail to close the feedback loop. Colleagues invest significant time in attending these events and in providing thoughtful feedback, and they expect to understand what will change as a result. When insights disappear into a report and are not visibly acted upon, trust in the process quickly erodes.
Communicating what will be done differently - and what will be continued because it worked - is critical to sustaining engagement and maintaining strong response rates over time.
From there, a consistent measurement framework can be applied across major internal programs, combining quantitative scores with qualitative insight to explain not just what happened, but why.
When insights are shared, acted upon, and used to shape future agendas and investment decisions, measurement becomes a strategic asset rather than a compliance exercise.
Looking ahead at 2026, what mindset shifts do you think will differentiate organisations that continue to invest meaningfully in internal events, from those that scale back?
Jan: The organizations that continue to invest meaningfully in internal events will adopt a mindset of intelligence over intuition. They will recognize that energy and engagement are insufficient proxies for impact, and that disciplined measurement enables smarter investment, not reduced ambition.
Crucially, these organizations will not just collect insight, but will act on it, visibly closing the loop with their teams and using feedback to shape future decisions.
These leaders will view internal events as evolving products, refined year-on-year using evidence rather than tradition. They will also accept that not measuring is a strategic liability, particularly as scrutiny increases.
Conversely, organizations that scale back will often do so not because events are ineffective, but because they lack the data and the confidence to defend and improve them.
The differentiator in 2026 will not be who spends the most, but who learns the fastest. Measurement, coupled with action, will be the mechanism that allows internal events to remain credible, optimized, and strategically indispensable.