4 Tips On How to Design a Presentation that Will Impress Your Audience

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Design a Presentation|4 Tips On How to Design a Presentation that Will Impress Your AudienceFor most people, the sole idea of standing in front of an audience, presenting something, is terrifying. Even so, most have to do this in their lifetime – and more often than they can anticipate. It’s very unlikely that a student will go through the educational system without being asked to present something, or that a person will get a higher position at work without the need to present their ideas to others.

That being said, everyone needs to learn how to create quality presentations. In presentations, the tools used in the process and the presentation itself make the biggest impact.

Now you’re probably thinking – and what about the presenter’s speech?

Yes, this is equally important, but you can hardly make a badly designed, messy presentation look good even if you are the best speaker. This means that everything starts with the presentation.

How to Design the Perfect Presentation

When you have a ready presentation, one that perfectly and concisely captures the information, and looks amazing, your job is almost done. You can prepare your speech thanks to the ready presentation, and engage the listeners with the carefully thought-out design.

Now, how do you make a great design for your presentation? This is what this article will explore.

1. Smart use of visuals

Visual aids are used to attract the listeners’ attention and compliment your oral presentation. The goal is not to repeat the same information, but to put an emphasis on the most important things and help the presenter with their speech.
The slides in a good presentation offer a summary or a visual element that supports the data that the presenter discusses. How you arrange them and which visuals you use can have a huge impact on the audience’s engagement, as well as the presenter’s success.

Let’s see some tips for the visual elements in your presentation.

Pitch’s writer has pointed out one highly important thing when designing a presentation – visual consistency. As their guide says: “slides don’t exist in a silo”. To create a presentation, you need slides that work as a unit, which requires the perfect layout, content, design, and structure. This is why your priority should be to build consistency into the presentation from the start, to avoid endless revisions afterward.

Some excellent tricks to make this possible, according to Pitch, are slide frames and backgrounds. Even if you provide different information in different slides, you can make it consistent thanks to patterns, shapes, and similar or same backgrounds across slides.

This requires a creative touch and some experience so, if you’re struggling with creating a consistent structure, you might want to use Pitch for assistance. The tool allows you to simply add your colors, fonts, and other brand elements, and create an amazing design without any troubles.

Some other tricks related to the visual elements of your presentation are:

  • Keep it simple. Over-cluttering your slides can only distract the audience, as well as the presenter. They simply ruin the design.
  • Remember that one picture can tell a thousand words. Instead of writing endless content, find the perfect visual that will present that same idea.
  • Think about accessibility. Using visuals is not just about using quality images, colors and fonts. It’s also about putting them on the slide. Can everyone see the visuals? Are they clear? Do they hide the content or vice versa?

2. Flowing structure

The visuals you use, as well as your speech, should be guided by the structure and content of the presentation. In most cases, presenters know what they want to say before they sit down to create it. However, many jump right at it without considering the structure, flow, and order of information.

This is where the mess happens.

Since presentation-making includes content creation as well as design, it’s important to plan it ahead. It’s similar to any other piece you create, just like the academic content you wrote at school. It is ideal to have an outline first.
How well you structure your content will have a huge effect on how good the presentation looks. This will also determine a lot of your design i.e. where you place the visuals, how you create font hierarchy, etc.

One general rule-of-thumb for structuring presentations is:

  • Start with a compelling introduction. Amazing presentations always start with attention-grabbing introductions. Unless you get their attention from the start, your chances of getting them interested in your speech are much lower. This is why this is the trickiest and most important part. It needs to introduce the topic interestingly, provide some facts, and engage the audience.
  • Offer a body of evidence. Once the audience knows what you’ll talk about and are eager to keep listening, it’s time to throw all the key information at them. Use evidence, facts, quotes, and everything else necessary to back up your main points. If there’s too much content in this part, reduce it to the most important parts, and use visuals to make it more appealing.
  • Sum things up. Now it’s time to end your presentation, so sum it up with key takeaways, and don’t forget to ask your audience if they have questions.

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Design a Presentation|4 Tips On How to Design a Presentation that Will Impress Your Audience3. An acceptable amount of content

In presentation-making and designing, less is more. You can’t just take the guide, book, or content you need to present and copy it into hundreds of slides. Okay, you can do it – but you definitely shouldn’t.

You also shouldn’t fill the entire slide with tons of content. Many do this and when the presentation begins, they read it word for word. That’s not how presentations should work.

The actual, tangible presentation on the screen should serve as a guide for the presenter. It’s you who has to share the information vocally, not write it all on the screen.

Even if your first content draft includes tons of data, that’s why edits are there for. You can write down everything you want to share at first, and reduce it gradually as you are designing your presentation. Ideally, you should limit the amount of copy on every slide you create to the very minimum.

Slides in your presentation should include only the key data. You should use it to point out the most important things and make them longer-lasting in the eyes of the audience. You should use it to list numbers that your audience might want to write down, or to emphasize things with percentages, quotes, and data.

When you’re creating the presentation, think ‘bite-size’. Present the information in chunks and, wherever possible, use visuals to complement the text. Inc.com reports that content that includes images produces up to 650% higher engagement compared to text-only content.

Just imagine – you are in the audience and someone talks for an hour by showing slides full of text all the time. Compare this to an experience where you can see charts, tables, images, and even videos. Which one sounds better?

It’s the latter, of course.

In terms of words in a slide, there are many opinions of the ideal number. For example, Pharmacoepi’s research shows that you need to use up to 30 words per slide. The popular 1-6-6 rule (or variants such as the 1-5-5 or 1-7-7) say that your slide should have 1 main idea, 6 bullet points, and 6 words per bullet point.

These aren’t rules and shouldn’t be taken as such. In fact, no one can tell you what the ideal word count is per slide, and it’s not obligatory to use the same system throughout your design.

In the end, it all comes down to your content, design choices, and preference. But, you should still keep your content more limited.

4. Right choice of fonts

Fonts are a tricky business when you need to present limited content, emphasize the key information, and make it visible from all angles. There are plenty of things to consider. If used properly, the font can make your design amazing. Here are some tricks that could help:

  • Find the right contrast between the background and your font. If your font and background don’t fit, it won’t really matter what you put on the screen. It can be hard to read, look bad, or annoy your audience. You don’t want any of this. This is why you need to find just the right combo, the perfect contrast between your font’s color and the background.
  • Use the standard fonts. It can be tempting to use those silly, bolded, or unusual fonts when you make your presentation. You may even think: “this will make it more unique and memorable”. But in most cases, this results in illegible presentation or messy content. This is why it’s safest to stick with the standards, fonts common for all computers (such as Arial, Verdana, or Tahoma). If you don’t, one big issue can occur – the computer you’re using might not have the font installed, and it will substitute it with something that doesn’t fit instead.

Wrapping up

Presentations can have a huge effect on the audience, as well as the presenter’s success. They can help you present your findings, make arguments, convince people to take action, guide them, motivate them, etc. But, to achieve all this, they need to be amazing. One huge part of it is the design. This is where you should get started – and focus on. Good luck.

Diagnosing and Planning Interventions Using ABAS-3

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article | Diagnosing and Planning Interventions Using ABAS-3Your adaptive behavior is your ability to handle everyday tasks and develop or maintain independence. The main components that make up adaptive behavior are conceptual, social, and practical skills. These change as individuals age. Therefore, individuals must learn more about diagnosing deficits and planning interventions. ABAS-3 is one tool that you can use to generate a diagnosis and plan an intervention for children and adults. Here is more on how you can use the ABAS-3 assessment for this purpose.

Functional Daily Living Skills

The most important part of planning an intervention is to provide an individual with their functional daily living skills, which allow them to complete various routines at home, school, work, and other locations. These are the crucial skills that allow individuals to develop and maintain their independence. Taking an assessment evaluates an individual’s skills, looking for strengths and weaknesses. The results identify which skills work best in certain environments and develop ways to help them transition to other locations.

Rating Scales

The major rating scale for these skills is the ABAS or Adaptive Behavior Assessment System. The forms for this rating scale include parents, primary caregivers, teachers, daycare providers, and adults. These gather information from each party that interacts with the respondent to provide a complete picture. This test uses all of these forms to evaluate individuals’ functional daily living skills of any age and give them a rating.

Composites and Skill Areas

The four composites evaluated with this test include conceptual, social, practical, and work skills. Conceptual skills include communication, academics, and self-direction. Social skills include leisure and socializing. Practical skills are those that contribute to communities, home living, health, safety, and self-care. Works skills are evaluated for older adults.

Item Ratings

After evaluating each composite, the assessment produces a rating. These show the ability of the skills to function in each environment. Additionally, they offer insight into how each skill transitions from one environment to another. The item ratings are the information the interventions and plans of implementation are based on.

Identifying Limitations and Addressing Them

The largest limitation of the assessment is establishing rapport between the assessor and the respondent. Additionally, it is important to make sure the respondents are properly prepared. Therefore, the assessor needs to explain the purpose of the assessment and emphasize the importance of honesty. Once the introduction is complete, the next step is to provide instructions on how to take the assessment. This allows for a proper evaluation of skill performance. The assessor is to remain available for any questions during the entire process. When all these steps are followed, there is more chance of an accurate diagnosis and successful intervention methods.

Adaptive behavior is a necessary part of being able to function and maintain independence. When a deficit is suspected, an assessment is necessary to diagnose the problem and institute intervention methods. While this particular assessment has the potential for limitations, there are ways to easily overcome these and create an accurate diagnosis so you can successfully implement intervention methods.

Learn more about adaptive behavior skills and how to assess them at WPS.

Productivity Shortcuts For Stressed Human Resources Professionals

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Productivity Shortcuts|Productivity Shortcuts For Stressed Human Resources ProfessionalsGetting on top of all your HR obligations is a massive challenge. There’s just so much work that needs to be done on a typical day that it can make your head spin. That’s why, in this post, we take a look at some productivity shortcuts that you can use to get more done in less time. Check them out below.

Set Priorities

One of the reasons that you feel rushed off your feet all the time is that you’re not setting priorities. Some jobs are more important than others. So when you leave them to the last minute, it makes you feel like you’re racing against the clock.

Setting priorities allows you to get all the most critical work done first. In the morning, spend 10 minutes putting all the tasks for the day into various “bins” representing your priority list. Start arranging them into perhaps five categories and then work your way through each of them. If high priority tasks arrive during the day, return to category 1 and start working your way through them again. This way, you can use your time more effectively.

Choose The Most Challenging Tasks First

People tend to be at their most productive in the mornings. That’s why it’s a good idea to do your most challenging tasks first. Don’t leave them until later. Get them out of the way and then save all the easy stuff until the afternoon when you’re feeling more tired and sleepy.

Avoid Multitasking At All Costs

Ignore the propaganda about some people being good at multitasking: it’s mostly untrue. You’ll get more done if you block time for specific activities. Focus on one thing at a time and you’ll get more done throughout the course of the day.

Use Productivity Tools

Not sure how to sign a PDF electronically? It’s actually way easier than you think. Mostly, you just need the right tool.

Want to organize your colleagues’ time more efficiently? There’s a tool for that too.

In fact, you can find productivity apps for practically any rote task that you find yourself doing daily. Make sure that you use them.

Meditate

This might sound a little strange, but it’s a good idea to meditate daily. Being an HR professional is a tough gig. There are so many pressures on your time that you can sometimes feel rushed off your feet. Avoid this through daily meditation and focus. Remind yourself that your work isn’t your life. It’s just something you do to make your leisure more enjoyable.

Set Work Sprints

Work sprints are a relatively new concept, but they tend to work exceptionally well. Instead of slogging through every day like one long marathon, take shorter sprints followed by breaks. Many people in the HR profession, for instance, like to work-sprint for 45 minutes and then take a break for 15 minutes at the end of it to recharge. Then they do it all over again. Research shows that breaking up the day like this can actually increase productivity.

Engagement: 5 Pragmatic Solutions to Apply Today

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Employee Engagement|Engagement: 5 Pragmatic Solutions to Apply TodayIt’s not perks and policies that move the dial on employee engagement. It’s the boss’s behavior. If you’re a boss, here are five tools to up your game.

Just about everyone in the U.S. has a cell phone. No news there, right? According to the Pew Research Center, in 2018, 99% of 18- to 49-year-olds, 97% of college graduates, and 98% of people with household incomes of $75K+ owned a cell phone. And nearly just as many people had access to the internet. The upside of these stats is positive, and the pandemic proved it. During long periods of isolation, we had technology to stay connected when we couldn’t physically keep in touch with one another.

But even pre-pandemic, a downside to this connectedness was observed in workplaces across the globe. With more technology—and, as a result, more data—came less face time. Managers and supervisors became glued to their reports, their screens, and their devices. Since technology became our third arm, we’ve gone heads-down and are less physically connected at work. Our leaders at every level have become less visible and their presence less felt.

At least, that’s what our observations from some 30,000 assessments have revealed. The more advanced the company’s technology, the less prone leadership is to be out on the floor, walking and talking with their teams. Even casual connections have become less purposeful. While the boss may still be in the game, using data to report what’s going on, he or she may not be perceived to be so by employees.

It’s time to show you’re in the game

Before the pandemic, engagement scores were terrifyingly low. If you sat in a meeting of 10 people, potentially eight of them were not fully present. Some of them could even have already mentally quit but stayed on. They weren’t engaged in your business, or worse, they may have disengaged and been actively working against you.

Take some consolation in the fact that you aren’t alone. These stats are global and ubiquitous the world over. But clearly, this knowledge isn’t helpful if you’re struggling to make your numbers, trying to achieve that next level of performance, or looking to transform your business. You need to aim for a 10 out of 10 engagement score. You need everyone to be all in.

So, how do you move the dial?

Tip 1: Get in the game. Lift your nose out of your devices, go heads up, and get in the game. Look, listen, and learn about what’s going on around you and how your team is feeling and performing. Prioritize people connections over internet connections. Whether you get out on the floor or attend more team meetings, get visible.

Tip 2: Practice HeadsUp leadership. When you routinely raise your head from your device and connect with people, you start to practice HeadsUp leadership, one of the simplest ways to immediately create better relationships with your teams. Doing so also results in safer, more productive, and engaging workplaces. Why? Because you see and hear things you can’t when you retreat to your reporting and devices.

Tip 3: Build a rhythm into your day. To help your team perform, use what we call “1.5.30.” Every day (1), check in for a quick catch-up. Every week (5), check in for 30 minutes to talk about overall performance progress. Once a month (30) check in for 60 minutes for a deep dive into how the job is going.

When you move this routine into a rhythm, you earn the right to provide performance feedback and to coach and guide people. But you also learn what you need to do to help people be successful by finding out what’s holding them back and developing your own action plans to improve the ecosystem in which people work.

Tip 4: Finetune your management behaviors. Do your own behaviors engage your people and kick-start continuous improvement? Are there clear objectives to your conversations? Do you and your teams plan assignments and agree on how often you’ll review progress?

Executed well, these behaviors enable your team to self-manage the variances out of their day—the difference between what was planned and what was actually achieved—and decide when they need your help.

Tip 5: Adopt the right tools. Do your management tools help you not only report results but also systematically plan and manage them? Are you using your forecasts, plans, schedules, reports, and action-planning tools to know which resources you need to do what, where, when, and how? When you have the right tools, you know exactly where you are and where you need to be. Which enables you to do what’s most important: engage with your teams to close any gaps.

What should be clear from these tips is how closely related engagement is to performance and operational results. Engagement gives you a multiplier. When you manage to engage, you address the healthy side of business (what we call humanize) and the fit side of business (what we call the optimize). Bring the two together, and you balance people, productivity, and profitability. While it’s great to add perks and policies for better engagement, what really moves the dial is when you manage to engage.


About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Pamela HackettPamela Hackett is the Global CEO of the international consultancy Proudfoot. Throughout her 35 years in management consulting, she has advised, led, and guided some of the world’s most prominent companies and brands through major change. Her new book, Manage to Engage: How Great Managers Create Remarkable Results, is a compendium of ideas and resources that will help any business focus on what matters—their people—to be more productive and profitable. Learn more at pamelahackett.com.

5 Tips on How to Identify Phishing Emails

StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Phishing|5 Tips on How to Identify Phishing EmailsLet us begin with defining and understanding phishing; it is a cybercrime in which a target victim is contacted by email, phone call or text message. The contact is established by someone illegally posing as a genuine establishment or an organization to lure individuals into giving out and surrendering sensitive data such as personal information, banking and financial credentials. The goal of phishing is to trick the recipient into believing that the message is something they want or need officially, like a request from their bank or probably a note from someone in their company and click a link or download an attachment that usually contains malicious software. What separates phishing is the attacker’s pretense as a trusted body of some sort to gain the victim’s faith.

Phishing is one of the oldest forms of cyberattacks, but that does not mean it is harmless. It is still one of the most prevalent and malicious types of cyberattacks to exist. Phishing is one of the most common means of cybercrime and what is worrying is that despite how much we think we know about scam emails, there are still people who frequently fall victim to this cyber attack.

Let’s see how to identify Phishing emails, the subtle signs that should help you spot one and how to stay protected from them.

1. Check if the message is sent from a public email domain

There is no chance of a genuine organization sending you an email from an address that ends with a public domain such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com. Authentic and genuine businesses would have their own email domain and company accounts. If the domain name matches the sender of the email, the message is in all totality legitimate.

Another way to check a business’s domain name is to do a quick google search making it easy to detect phishing.

Many of us don’t ever look at the email address that a message has come from, which also holds many clues that can help you spot a phishing email.

When cybercriminals create their fake email addresses to lure people into their schemes, they often have the option to select the display name, which does not have to relate to the email address at all. Therefore, they can use a phoney email address that will turn up in your inbox with the display name of a trusted brand or business.

2. Obvious grammar and spelling errors

If you get an email from a big business or organization, but it contains many basic spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, it is an obvious sign that it is a phishing email. Therefore, you should read the email carefully and check for these mistakes because they serve as clues that help you identify a phishing email.

3. Open attachments with utmost care

Email attachments are necessary and carry a lot of vital information, but they are the biggest threat to your device, and you could end up becoming a victim of phishing. This is the reason why it is essential to scan every attachment in your email.

Email attachments, particularly from unknown senders, can have viruses, malware and other malicious programs that could hamper the security of your system and make it easier for an attacker or cyber-criminal to gain access.

So, make sure to scan all attachments you receive from both known and unknown senders to stay protected.

4. Protect your email by using an SSL Certificate

We often wonder is this website safe? The threat of phishing is growing daily, with websites and emails at most risk of this menace. To make emails more secure and resilient to online attacks like MiTM attacks, you should get Cheap SSL Certificate. Secure Socket Layer gives a safe and secure transfer-layer interaction among two end-users, the sender of the email and the receiver.

Installing an SSL certificate warrants that every communication between the server and browser stays encrypted and secured from external threats. In addition, an SSL certificate encrypts communications on websites whenever it is technically feasible, making it harder for attackers to shoot phishing emails.

5. The message has a sense of urgency

If you receive an email giving a piece of essential news or update and asking you to reply and act immediately, it mostly is a phishing email. But a careful study of such email or message makes you realize that the organization doesn’t get in touch with you by that email address, and you learn that they did not send you a document at all. That is why so many scams and phishing schemes request that you act as soon as possible. It is also common for phishing emails to instill panic in the recipient as if you would incur some heavy loss if you do not act. The email may claim that your account may have been compromised, and the only way to confirm it is if you enter your login details, such as username and password. And with this act, you have just given away your details to the scammers. Then again, the email might state that your account will be locked if you do not act instantly.

So, ensure that you take the time to go through the processes mentioned above and check if it is a genuine email and act only if and when, you are sure. If you are unsure, however, contact the company directly through some other means.