At Go1, we aim to provide only the best content available so that you can meet your training needs. That is why we are very pleased to announce our new partnership with Global Vision Media, an industry-leading provider of innovative, cost-effective eLearning solutions. 

Global Vision Media is an award-winning company with a rich history and experience. With 20 years of expertise in the areas of instructional design, content development, learning management systems and talent management systems, their aim is to help their clients to measure the return on their training investment and to achieve maximum learning efficiency and effectiveness.

Global Vision Media has a suite of seven AU compliance courses which are particularly aimed at local councils. Global Vision Media has won two Australian Institute of Training and Development awards over the last 10 years, making them an ideal partner for Go1 in the Australian workplace compliance space. All courses are short, clear and concise and very easy for all employees to complete.

Occupational health & safety for employees

Occupational health & safety for managers

Equal employment opportunity for employees

Equal employment opportunity for managers

Workplace bullying & harassment for employees

Workplace bullying & harassment for managers

Go1 makes it easy for businesses to train their staff, with the world’s largest compliance, professional development and general training marketplace. You can now find all of Global Vision Media's courses available in Go1 Premium. 

Learn more about the courses available from Global Vision Media here 

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Go1 announces new partnership with Global Vision Media 

Today, on Friday 8 March, we celebrate International Women’s Day across the world.

For many, it’s a day to celebrate women’s achievements; for others, it’s a reminder and call-to-action to continue pushing for gender equality.

One of the key areas in which we see a lack of gender equality is in the workforce, where there remains a clear difference between the way women and men are treated and valued.

In fact, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2017 has predicted that it will take over two centuries to achieve gender parity across the world – with another 217 years of inequality for female workers.

The gender gap in Australia’s workforce

In Australia, women account for 34% of senior managers and 16% of chief executives in the private sector.

Recent research from three separate organisations shows senior female managers earn, on average, $93,000 less per year than their male equivalents.

In large publicly listed companies, only 5% of ASX 200 CEOs are women.

High-level female managers earn an average of 5% less than male managers.

Women are also still significantly outnumbered when it comes to working in STEM-related studies and careers, making up only one in four IT graduates and fewer than one in 10 engineering graduates.

How employers and managers can promote gender equality

Aim for an equal target of representation of each gender in employment and leadership roles.

Make sure that women and men who are doing the same role (for example, two engineers or two senior leaders) are paid the same amount of money.

Ensure female employees are involved in policy and decision-making processes.

Always be inclusive, making sure women are equally represented in delegations, speaking panels and boards.

By working to address inequality, and encourage a higher representation of female leadership, you'll be pressing for progress in this area.

Your organisation will also benefit from having more women in leadership roles, as you’ll be encouraging greater diversity of thought and experience – something that is highly valuable in any industry.

What employees can do to support women in the workplace

It’s not just CEOs and employers who can make a difference in improving gender equality in the workplace.

Employees are also encouraged to look closely at how their female colleagues are treated and valued in the workplace. Let International Women’s Day be a reminder to speak up about gender inequality when you see it.

The International Women’s Day website has excellent suggestions for how individuals – women, men and non-binary people – can create positive change within their own spheres of influence. In doing this, male employees can help to address gender bias in the workplace, becoming better champions and allies for equality.

Commit to taking positive action today – and every day 

Question any lack of women's participation

Ensure credit is given for women's contributions

Supportively call-out inappropriate behaviour

Identify alternatives that are more inclusive

How are you addressing gender equality in your workplace?

Easily group your content to share with your users!

Preview the improved Groups feature, replacing what was previously called "Discussions".  

With this release, we've taken away the emphasis of the Groups feature being for discussions or notes. Now it is a feature you can use to group relevant content on your portal, for a specific department, region or team, which you can then assign to your learners or share across portals. 

Look forward to an enhanced Groups feature, to help Admins and Learners experience more value from their Groups; this includes

Clear difference between assigned learning as well as additional learning in a Group,

For Admins; easier management of Groups including the members, the creation process and the sharing across portals. 

If you want more detailed information about how to navigate these changes in your platform read on and refer to help guides here: Knowledge Base.

You will notice the look and feel of the Groups tab has been created inline with the new course editor interface. 

These updates will make it easy to view your Groups (which you are a member of or owner of) and all public Groups on your portal. 

The Groups creation pop-up, makes it easy to specify group title, description and the visibility settings in one easy flow.

This release has updated the concept of Public Groups, so that now a Group is either shared with a person or your portal. If its public (and shared to the portal), a  user can see the Group (in Group Explore) and then choose to join. By default the visibility will be "Private", which means only users you add to the group can view it and join. 

Once you click through a Group, you can easily view from the Overview tab, 

Admins/Groups Owners can also see and Edit and Assign actions

Mange members easily via the Members tab:

The release provides you the ability to manage all the enrolment of members to a group, even across Groups shared to other portals.

As a Group Owner (or Admin), you can view the tally of total members in this group including members who have joined via another portal the group was shared with. You can easily add new members via the pop-up and excitingly also the Groups creator is no longer a member by default!

What is the difference between added to this group or assigned?

NEW: For courses you create on your portal you have the option to directly add the course to a Group, when you are in the course edit mode: Select the group from sharing suggestion list AND Select 'Can view' or 'Can enroll' permission. This course will now appear in the group!

If however, you want to assign learning with a due date, we suggest you do that via the assign button in the Groups interface. The content doesn't need to be added to the group in order to be assigned.

Having the option to add content as well as assign content, enables the Group to be a place to customise content for a subset of your users or for your portal; which your learners can then choose from. 

You can Share a group of content to another portal, which we suggest works for our customers with multiple portals. 

Ensure within Portal Settings < Portal Content Selection, your portal has accepted Groups shared to it. 

Now you can view the groups in Groups Explore, which you can join. 

If you share content groups across portals with Premium content with a course; portals without Premium will not be ale to access the Premium LI's . 

For content to be visible across portals, add the content to the group (do not assign), if you are sharing course across portals - assigned content can not be viewed in shared groups. 

 The permissions of learning which is added to a group will be inherited by all users . For example, if the learning item is shared   with 'can enroll' permissions to a Group and then that Group is shared to a portal with can view permissions, users within the shared portal can enroll into the course. 

Group Owners can only share their groups (groups that are created by them) to their current portal or other portals, whereas Portal Admins can share all groups (created on their portal). 

If content is assigned to that group, users will inherit the assigned content in their My Learning Dashboard and similarly if they leave the group the content will be un-assigned. 

Stay up to date on the latest important dates related to your Go1 platform.

Discover more about the new Groups feature!

While every company experiences staff turnover, when the level reaches too high, it creates an assortment of problems. As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to understand the reasoning behind a high staff turnover rate, the consequences that follow, and the options you have to prevent it from happening.

Keep in mind that employee turnover spares no industry. But according to a LinkedIn article, three in particular struggle the most in retaining qualified workers. At the top of the list are tech companies, those that specialize in software. This industry has a 13.2 percent turnover rate. Next in line are retailers and consumer goods companies with a rate of 13 percent. Coming third are media and entertainment, along with professional services, at 11.4 percent.

Additional industries with the highest staff turnover rate include:

Government, education, and not-for-profit organizations – 11.2 percent

Insurance and financial services – 10.8 percent

Automotive, transportation, and aerospace – 9.6 percent

Healthcare and pharmaceutical – 9.4 percent

Some industries have a higher risk than others. But overall, every business needs to recognize the problem and act quickly to avoid fallout.

Reasons for employee turnover and easy fixes

The first and most important thing you need to do is gain insight into why your employee turnover rate is high. Only then can you address the issue appropriately. One thing important to note is that due to the type of work involved, some industries are naturally more prone to a high staff turnover rate than others. However, even if your company falls within one of those, you still have viable options to correct and control the problem.

While experts have some differing opinions, the majority agree on 10 specific reasons for a high turnover rate. Unfortunately, you can lose excellent employees right along with the bad if any of the following exists within your organization. When assessing your company, be on the lookout for any of these. If identified, consider the remedies provided.

“Office politics” are a huge issue. If you have people working for your company who participate in back-stabbing, gossiping, throwing blame, or being rude to their co-workers, you’ll have a hard time keeping anyone on the payroll. In this case, your HR Director, along with department heads and your L&D Manager need to devise a plan to stop this behavior in its tracks.

You may have the most dedicated and hard-working employees in the world. But when an imbalance between work and personal life develops, it can force them to leave the company. Regardless if you recently had to downsize or require your staff to put in long hours, you have to make sure your employees do not compromise their life outside of work.

One of the best ways to get your staff to perform is by empowering them. That means giving those qualified the opportunity to make decisions. Not only does this give your workers authority, but it also makes them more accountable. Again, you need a system in place whereby your leaders do not micromanage but empower the employees instead.

Everyone, regardless of their title or position, wants to feel valued in the workplace. If you don’t have some type of reward system in place, it won’t take long before workers begin to seek other employment. Make sure the leaders within your organization come up with a plan that both recognizes and rewards hard-working employees. 

It’s essential for your managers to provide feedback combined with mentoring to help your employees succeed. If that’s not currently happening, you need to make a change in how you run your business. Honest comments, whether positive or negative, go a long way in prompting people to do more and do better. 

Another reason behind a high staff turnover rate has to do with the job not meeting expectations. You probably know that positions can change after onboarding someone. But if the work involved is too far off from what the individual agreed to at the time of hiring, you take the chance of losing that individual as an employee.

For this, your HR Director and your leadership team need to evaluate positions and make adjustments if necessary. As an example, if you hired someone to work closely with customers, but soon after starting the job, that person’s position changed to having little to no direct contact. You can anticipate an unhappy employee.

Sure, some people spend their entire working career doing the same thing while remaining completely content. However, this is rare.  If you want to avoid a high staff turnover rate, you need to give your staff the opportunity to advance. Workers who see potential for growth are more likely to remain loyal to a company.

Whether your business is going through a rough patch or rumours have circulated throughout the organization about a possible closing or downsizing, you need to nip this problem in the bud quickly. Instead of keeping your staff in the dark, be transparent. The number of employees willing to stick around through the good and the bad times would surprise you.

Obviously, the goal when hiring is to select people with the right qualifications. Therefore, be sure you place employees in the right positions. Also, because responsibilities can change, always provide training as needed. For this, your L&D manager can select online training courses that bring your employees up to speed in no time.

A lot of people accept positions according to promised promotions and raises. If you had to freeze these perks for some reason, and your staff has the chance to work elsewhere for 20 percent more, you can bet your turnover rate will increase. Again, be honest with your employees, so they know you understand their frustration and are doing everything humanly possible to turn the situation around as fast as possible. 

Now you understand why most employees leave a company. But to fully appreciate why this is something you want to avoid, take a look at the fallout. No matter what product or service you sell, your staff is your most valuable asset. Even in the age of technology, mega organizations know that success comes from having employees who are satisfied with their jobs.

The problem is a lot of companies focus so much on hiring, as well as product and service development, and they fail to give any serious consideration to employee retention. If you want your business to remain competitive and successful, you have to look at the bigger picture. After all, a high staff turnover rate is expensive in more ways than one.

As a perfect example, People of Greenhouse, led by VP Maia Josebachvili, created a case study that shed some interesting light on workplace turnover. In this study, the team determined that retaining a salesperson for three years, as opposed to two, improving onboarding practices, and enhancing management strategies, yielded a net value difference of $1.3 million to a company over the course of three years. 

This same organization shared some insightful beliefs as to what you should consider for your company. Three things, in particular, stand out, which the People of Greenhouse implemented, including “nurture brilliant and talented employees, encourage employees, and empower employees.”

Some experts go with even higher numbers when estimating the financial loss of staff turnover. For instance, the Center for American Progress published a report that spanned 15 years. In that report, it cited 11 different research papers. The outcome was that a company with a turnover of an extremely skilled worker could cost the business 213 percent of that person’s annual wage.

While other experts have an even more conservative viewpoint, claiming the cost of losing an employee typically ranges from tens of thousands of dollars to up to twice the annual salary of the employee who leaves. It’s still too much. Remember, you invest a lot on your staff, from recruitment and hiring through training and ramp-up to achieve optimum productivity. 

The cost of having an employee leave also covers a greater degree of errors, general culture impacts, and a decrease in engagement with others. Think about that for a minute – one employee making $50,000 could cost you as much as $100,000 – just ONE. For a significant turnover rate, the numbers increase dramatically in no time at all. 

Breaking the numbers down, consider a company with 150 employees and a current 11 percent yearly turnover rate. Spending $25,000 on hiring, $10,000 for each turnover, plus development, and roughly $50,000 on productivity opportunity while trying to replace a staff member, that company could easily lose $1.57 million annually on turnovers.

Although workers leave a company due to being underpaid, the number one reason for a problem with turnover has to do with employee dissatisfaction. For that reason, you need to focus your efforts in that direction above all else. Following are the most critical areas that you need to address.

Remember the discussion about career advancement; you need to provide your staff with growth opportunities. Even more than job security and salary, providing your employees with a chance to advance within the organization will significantly decrease your turnover rate.

For example, if you have employees who enhance their skills by taking online training courses or attending a conventional college campus, take advantage of that. By moving that person to a better fitting position, you’d quickly see an improvement in work satisfaction. Also, have your HR Director spend time with your employees to gain an understanding of their long-term career goals.

As human beings, your employees need to know that you as the owner, as well as your entire leadership team, genuinely care about them and have their best interest at heart. By building a workplace culture whereby everyone appreciates and respects others will help reduce your turnover.

You need to consider how an employee impacts your company and the way your company affects the world. In this case, develop a clear mission statement and share it with your entire staff. This will encourage your employees to work through tough times and remain focused on the business priority. In other words, your employees need a clear vision of what they’re striving for and then be recognized for what they do.

Arm your staff with the tools and resources they need to succeed. If you have a high employee turnover rate, you not only lose financially, but your company’s reputation could also suffer. If potential and existing customers see that you have a lot of employees coming and going, it makes them question your business’ integrity and practices.

At the same time, a high staff turnover rate could give your competitors an edge. Using that to their advantage, they can quickly take some of your customers, which is never a good thing. All in all, it’s imperative that you recognize a problem and take the appropriate action immediately. Otherwise, your company could suffer to the point of failing altogether.

Always remember to provide your employees with training. At the time of bringing new staff onboard and throughout their career with your organization, make online courses a part of your overall strategy to keep employee morale and productivity up.

Along with your day-to-day workers, you should give your leadership team the same opportunity. For one thing, training enhances skills while introducing your staff to new ones that they can use to better themselves and the company. Also, ongoing training gives people a sense of empowerment and shows that you’re willing to invest in them and their career.

Although you can find an abundance of companies that offer online training, not all have the same caliber of courses available. Go1 has a reputation for providing a broad range of superior quality topics, with courses developed and often presented by industry leaders. For a nominal fee, use training to reverse turnover within your organization.

The real cost of a high staff turnover rate

 We are excited to welcome content creator ViaUp to the Go1 Premium library. 

ViaUp is an Australian e-learning creator who specialises in crafting engaging learning experiences through their e-learning content. They bring their content to life, to create corporate learning that resonates.   

ViaUp courses are developed with the fundamental principles in mind, that organisations can achieve their missions, if they ensure employees understand and appreciate the importance of:

ViaUp content is created in collaboration with leading subject matter experts, to ensure the learning material is relevant and at the forefront of discussions on the subject. 

Their content is delivered via rich and interactive video and immediately upon enrolling in a course, you will experience extraordinary interactive learning of a quality unlike most other animated e-learning videos. 

ViaUp has five courses available in Go1 Premium: 

The Bullying, Harassment and Discrimination course, is short course which offers the toolkit employees need to help themselves and their co-workers to identify and then respond in the right way, to inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. Read more about it here. 

Driver Safety course, with more employees driving for work in different capacities, being safe on the road is incredibly important. Make sure you know how to keep yourself and others safe when you’re behind the wheel. Read more about it here. 

Office Ergonomics, is course to empowers organisation to identify and address the causes of poor office ergonomics by providing them with information that enables them to correctly set up and utilise their office workstation. 

Alcohol and Other Drugs course, enables organisations to identify and address the risks involved when somebody chooses to show up to work under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. By addressing these risks, and dispelling some of the myths surrounding the topic, people will be empowered to prevent incidents and support their colleagues.

You can now find these ViaUp’s courses, plus a more coming soon including a course on Stress, Anxiousness and Anxiety! 

ViaUp available in Go1 Premium and are accessible in all regions however the content was created for an Australian market.  

Want access? Sign up for Go1 Premium today!

Go1 welcomes our newest Content Partner: ViaUp

How to Use Active Listening Skills to Coach Employees to Solve Their Own Problems

Think of a boss – that’s the person who tells everyone what to do, right? The thing is that no-one likes being told what to do. Successful managers don’t just rely on their authority to boss people around. Instead successful managers have a much stronger form of personal power and that’s the power to communicate persuasively. And one of the most persuasive, but little known, forms of communication is using active listening skills to coach employees to solve their own problems. 

When we think about communication skills people usually think about talking or writing. 

But communication is a two-way street. Without listening, you’re not communicating, you’re just broadcasting. Listening is the other half of successful communication.

What is your Active Listening communication score? Take the Quiz to find out.

What I’d like to share with you is some of the powerful ways that you can use active listening to be a better boss.

“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking” Bernard M. Baruch

 5 Ways to Use Active Listening to be a Better Boss

1. Coach Your Employees to Solve their Own Problems

When your employees bring you a problem the natural urge is to solve the problem for them ASAP. But the problem is that when you solve your employees’ problems for them, then you’re training them to bring you their problems to solve. What you end up with is more problems, not fewer. Instead of showing them that you know the answer, invest a little time to coach them through finding their own solution.  

2. Build Better Relationships with Employees 

Listening is essentially the whole premise behind Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” Humans have a basic need to be understood. Listening to people helps them to feel valued. Conversely working for a boss who doesn’t listen to you destroys motivation. This is why your One-on-One Meetings with Employees always start with their agenda.

“The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them” Ralph G. Nichols 

Ownership is that manager nirvana where your employees take responsibility for their work. When you tell your employee what to do, they don’t own your solution. But when you use active listening skills to coach them to come up with their own solution, they also have the ownership to prove that their solution works.

4. Stimulate Creativity, Innovation & Problem Solving

Successful bosses don’t try to do everything themselves. Successful bosses are the bosses who can leverage the unique skills and abilities of every employee on their team. Got a complex problem that you don’t have the time to solve? Delegate the responsibility to your employee and then coach them through their own problem solving. This isn’t just a problem solving technique because your employee’s love learning and growing.

Train your employees to solve their own problems and they won’t need to wait to find the time in your busy diary. Don’t let your long to do list become a massive bottleneck. 

Managing employees is difficult because people are complex and school doesn’t teach you how to be a better boss. If you want to be a better boss, giving effective performance communication is one of the essential manager skills that you need to develop. But don’t forget that half of communication is listening. And effective managers know how to use listening to build better relationships, create ownership, stimulate growth, encourage innovation and build problem solving.

So the next time your employees come to you with a problem, resist your natural urge to quickly solve the problem for them. Instead of telling them what to do, use active listening skills to coach your employees to solve their own problems.

This article is a guest post from Manager Foundation which specialises in showing people the soft skills they need to create a happier, more productive workplace. 

The forgotten half of communication skills for bosses

Whilst 2019 is only two months in, there have been no signs of slowing down for Go1! We've had some great articles come out in the press that you might find interesting, so we’ve put together this round up of links from the month of February for you to read over. We encourage you to catch them now if you missed them earlier, or re-read them to see if there’s more you can learn! 

The very first episode of Meet the Innovator by Innov8 Logan features Go1 co-founder Andrew Barnes. 

Meet the innovator  //  Episode 1  //  Andrew Barnes, go1

Featuring Vu Tran, co-founder of Go1, via Dynamic Business.

UK targets Aussie tech firms for post-Brexit economy

Featuring Mark Bolton, General Manager of Go1 - UK Division.

Featuring Ryan Parsons, Chief Financial Officer at Go1 via Dynamic Business. 

We've had a great month and look forward to what is to come in March! 

Let's take a look back at some of the great things Go1 has been involved with so far in February 2019. 

A monthly round-up of all things Go1: February edition

BRISBANE, 25 FEBRUARY, 2019:  Go1, the world’s largest onboarding, compliance and professional development platform, has signed a new partnership with one of the world’s leading digital learning specialists Kineo.

The partnership enables Go1 users to purchase the best of Kineo’s elearning courses or packages directly through Go1's Marketplace*. 

Kineo was founded in 2005 and quickly grew a global footprint including Australia, New Zealand, UK and the US. As part of the City & Guilds Group, a global collective of learning first businesses who are celebrating their 140-year anniversary, Kineo is dedicated to preparing people for the future of work. 

Go1 offers more than 500,000 courses and reaches 22 million users through its platform and integrated partners. Go1 CEO and co-founder Andrew Barnes says the partnership will further drive eLearning in the APAC region and globally.

"Kineo and Go1 share a philosophy of making learning accessible and engaging. We’re delighted to make their courses available through the Go1 platform. We now offer well over half a million courses created by experts, from first-aid training through to university-led courses," Mr Barnes says.

Kineo has a wide range of professional training courses and the only provider to have endorsement by the National Safety Council Australia Foundation (NSCA). Look out for added value benefits with NSCA co-branded digital credentialing coming soon to 30 work health safety course titles. 

The most popular Kineo courses cover workplace safety:

1.     Bullying and Harassment for Employees

2.     Work Health and Safety Fundamentals

4.     Identifying, Reporting and Responding to the Abuse of Older People in Care

6.     Equal Employment Opportunity for Employees

8.     Infection Prevention and Control

 Find more information on the Kineo courses here. 

The partnership will also see Go1 and Kineo working together to support clients looking for an enterprise platform solution, in particular Totara. 

Kineo’s Head of Strategic Alliances, Craig Parr, added that the company is tremendously excited about the potential the partnership brings and making their courses accessible to Go1 users. 

"As a City & Guilds Group business we're part of a powerful global group, leading the way in skills development, technology and credentialing. However, at Kineo we couldn't do what we do without the help of great relationships – with our customers and delivery partners like Go1." 

Together Kineo and Go1 are united by a single purpose - helping people and organisations develop skills for growth. 

“We are working together to offer end-to-end digital learning solutions to customers around the world," said Craig Parr.

* Kineo courses will not be available through the Go1 Premium subscription and are to be purchased separately. 

To access Kineo's elearning courses, get in touch with one of our team members today. 

New high-quality, professionally endorsed courses now available

Go1 adds 88 new courses with Kineo partnership 

According to the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), 65 percent of people are visual learners. That means if you hold a meeting, training session, or some other work-related gathering, unless you use some type of visual aid, you’ll probably lose the majority of your audience’s attention within minutes. Although you have many different options, slideshow presentations still reign supreme.

Regardless of which type of presentation you decide on, an excellent way to help your staff absorb and retain the information shared is by using a PowerPoint slideshow or some other visual aid. Each of the options listed below boasts unique capabilities and advantages. Keep in mind that for training purposes, it’s especially important to select the appropriate type of presentation.

An informative speech is the most commonly used form of presenting research data. With this, your Learning and Development (L&D) Manager has the opportunity to present specific findings in a systematic way that people understand.

As the name implies, this presentation involves communicating with your employees through some kind of demonstration. Whether that’s how to work machinery, install a component, or make the perfect wedding cake, you want to use slides that contain images along with step-by-step instructions to drive the message home. 

The goal of this presentation is to encourage your employees to see things differently than they currently do. For instance, if you want to emphasize the importance of an open-door policy among your leadership team or help your employees understand the value of eating nutritional foods, this would be the correct presentation to use. In other words, this presentation works to change thinking patterns about a particular issue or topic. 

Do you want to “light a fire” under your sales and marketing team, show your employees how a new product solves problems, or perhaps you have young employees who need a gentle push to help them feel excited about achieving success within your organization? An inspirational speech works to motivate people and push them toward a goal. 

For a presentation to make the greatest impact, consider combining a little bit of each type of speech. You can still focus on a primary topic but at the same time, cover more bases. 

For a presentation to have the intended impact on your employees, it’s vital that you include the right leaders during the planning phase. If you want to organize a corporate-wide training program, you need input from your HR Director, L&D Manager, and even your Compliance Manager. However, for a presentation that’s more department-focused, you want your HR Director and the department head to brainstorm together.

Regardless of the presentation, and whether you’re organizing in-house training for a large group or sharing information obtained through an online course for a select number of employees, success starts by creating a compelling and memorable message.

See Things from the Employees’ Perspective 

When putting a presentation together, try to see things from your employees’ viewpoint. By drafting a speech with humor, emotion, storytelling, and interesting facts, you will have a captivated audience.

You don’t want to give presentations just for the sake of saying you did. Instead, there must be a point for the meeting or training session. Some reasons include a new product rollout, launching a new service, utilizing different equipment or machinery, and bringing your employees up-to-date on compliance issues. Select a topic that will ultimately benefit both your staff and the organization.

Instead of a catch-all, a presentation should have one focus and one goal. If you have multiple topics to address, you can either create additional presentations or have the applicable staff members complete training courses online. That way, you don’t hold up production for the sake of covering everything with one swipe. 

Before finalizing a presentation, including the supporting documentation that you pass out to employees, double and even triple check all facts. Along with that, make sure your spelling and grammar are on point. 

Just like “location, location, location” is vital in the real estate world, practice is critical when preparing for presentations. The more you practice the better the results.  

A common mistake made by presenters is having employees take notes. Since everyone has a unique perception, there’s no guarantee they’re all writing down the same message. Therefore, prepare supporting materials and pass them out before giving your presentation.

Remember, the material you hand out should support the topic of the speech. At no time do you want to give your employees a copy of the slides themselves as that makes you look lazy and disinterested. 

After creating a killer presentation comes the fun, and also nerve-wracking part: delivering the message. Use the following tips to ensure your employees engage.

From the minute that you take the stage, put your credentials on display. That doesn’t mean going over your entire career bio, but rather providing important details that let your employees know you’re a person of authority on the topic and in the industry. As a credible presenter, your audience is more likely to pay close attention.

Early on, let your staff know the goal of the presentation. Whether you’re there to get input about a new product, service, or process, setting and revealing the goal helps people relate and it’ll keep you on task.

Even when addressing a serious topic, a compliance issue pertaining to workplace safety for example, not only do you want to inform your employees, but it’s also important entertain them to some degree. Remember, giving a presentation in front of a live audience is entirely different than sending out an internal email. Therefore, you need to appeal to their emotions, which comes from both passion and humor.

As stated by Jeremy Choi, a highly respected entrepreneur, leader, and professional presenter, “Create a single sentence description for every service, product, or idea.” He explains that a presentation riddled with long descriptions appears confusing. For that reason, he stresses to keep descriptions as part of a PowerPoint presentation slide to no more than 140 characters.

If you opt for a slideshow presentation in conjunction with your speech or training, never use more than 10 slides, keep the duration to 20 minutes, and use at least a 30-point font. Anything more than that will cause your staff to lose interest. If you look at reputable Learning Management Systems, you’ll see that most courses take little time to complete.