I have spoken with dozens of Executive Assistants and Chiefs of Staff since we started building SALVA. The conversation always starts the same way — with the event they are currently organising, the deadline, the headcount, the constraints. But if you let it run long enough, it goes somewhere else.

It goes to the weight of it.

Not the logistics. The responsibility. The specific kind of pressure that comes from being the person who makes something happen for people who will never fully understand what it took to make it happen. You are invisible when it works. You are very visible when it doesn't.

I wanted to understand this better. So I started paying attention to the research.

What the data says about invisible work

In organisational psychology, there is a category of labour called "office housework" — the administrative, coordinative and relational tasks that keep an organisation functioning but are rarely recognised, compensated, or even named. A 2018 study by NYU researchers found that this type of work is disproportionately absorbed by women in professional environments, and that the people who do it most are paradoxically the least likely to be promoted — because the time spent on coordination is time not spent on visible, attributable output.

A separate body of research on what psychologists call "emotional labour" — the work of managing your own emotional state in order to manage the experience of others — shows consistent links to burnout, reduced job satisfaction, and what researchers term "compassion fatigue." A 2021 meta-analysis in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology covering 154 studies found that high emotional labour demands were among the strongest predictors of professional exhaustion.

Executive Assistants and Chiefs of Staff sit at the intersection of both. They coordinate everything. They absorb the stress of everyone above them. They are the first call when something goes wrong and the last person thanked when something goes right.

This is not a complaint. Most of the people I have spoken to chose this work precisely because they are good at it, and because there is a specific satisfaction in being the person who makes things run. But the weight is real. And it compounds.

The event problem specifically

Organising a high-stakes corporate event adds a particular layer to this weight.

The event is, by definition, visible. It will be attended by senior people who will have opinions. It reflects on whoever organised it — not in ways that are usually articulated, but in ways that are felt. Was the room right. Did the food work. Was the tone what it needed to be.

A 2019 survey by the Events Industry Council found that 67% of corporate event planners reported experiencing significant stress in the 48 hours before a major event, with the primary sources being vendor reliability, last-minute changes, and the gap between what was promised and what was delivered.

That last one is worth sitting with. The gap between what was promised and what was delivered. It is the fundamental anxiety of working with vendors — that you will have done everything right on your end, communicated clearly, confirmed twice, followed up — and something will still go wrong in a way that is entirely outside your control. And you will be the one standing in the room when it does.

This is the anxiety we designed SALVA around. Not food. Not cuisine. This.

What reduces the weight

The research on stress and professional performance consistently points to one factor above others: perceived control. Not actual control — perceived control. The belief that you understand what is going to happen, that the people you are working with are competent and have thought things through, and that if something unexpected occurs, it will be handled.

This is why the pre-event brief matters more than most vendors understand. A phone call where Paolo asks three specific questions about the moment — not about dietary requirements, not about the menu, but about who will be in the room and what the afternoon needs to feel like — changes something. It signals that the person you have hired has thought about more than their own job. That they have thought about yours.

A 2020 study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found that trust in a service provider was most strongly predicted not by past performance but by perceived attentiveness — the sense that the provider was actively tracking your needs rather than executing a preset process. The distinction is subtle but measurable. And it makes a significant difference to how people experience the event itself, even when the food is identical.

The morning after

There is a moment I find particularly telling in the research on event professionals. It is not during the event. It is the morning after.

A qualitative study on event planners published in Tourism Management in 2018 described what researchers called "post-event emotional depletion" — a specific pattern of exhaustion that follows a successful event, characterised not by relief but by flatness. The work is done. It went well. And yet the person who made it happen often feels, in the days that follow, more empty than restored.

Part of this is physiological — the cortisol crash that follows a period of sustained high alertness. Part of it is structural — the recognition that the next event is already approaching, that the cycle will begin again.

But part of it, I think, is simpler than that. It is the experience of having done something significant for other people and not having that acknowledged — not because anyone is ungrateful, but because they were never really aware of what it took.

This is why the 48-hour follow-up we send after every SALVA intervention is not addressed to the executive who hosted it. It is addressed to the person who organised it. The one who handled the access, confirmed the brief, made sure Paolo had everything he needed, and then stood in the back of the room hoping it would all work.

It usually does.

But they should hear it anyway.

What we built SALVA around

When Paolo and I designed the way SALVA works — the site visit, the brief, the single point of contact, the silent departure — we were thinking about the person in the room at 7am making sure the tables were right.

Not just about the food. About the whole experience of working with a vendor that actually reduces your load rather than adding to it.

The research on cognitive load in professional environments is clear: every decision you have to make, every follow-up you have to chase, every confirmation you have to request, takes something from the finite reserve of attention you have for the things that actually matter. A vendor who requires management is not just an inconvenience. They are a tax on your capacity.

We wanted to be the opposite of that.

One brief. One visit. One person on site. One follow-up the next morning.

That's it. The rest is taken care of.