4 Ways Presentations Can Improve Staff Engagement 2024

People are always talking about how important staff engagement is for short and long-term business success.

However, it’s not always clear how to create a highly-engaged professional team. It’s easy to describe how people act when they’re engaged vs. disengaged, but harder to define what concrete things businesses can do to make people feel and act that way.

Large-scale initiatives like employee benefits and team building activities are often linked to staff engagement, but there are also simpler tools out there. One of them is presentations.

Whether you’re a small business or a large organization, well thought out presentations can make a huge impact on staff engagement. Keep reading to find out how.

= Table of Content hide

1 What is staff engagement?

2 How presentations can improve staff engagement

2.1 1. Make dynamic internal communications with presentation software like Pitch

2.2 2. Foster a sense of community and connection

2.3 3. Bring remote and global teams together

2.4 4. Keep employees well-informed

3 Use presentation to kick your staff engagement up a notch

What is staff engagement?

Staff engagement means several different things on a micro and a macro level.

On a macro or “big picture” level, staff engagement normally refers to how aligned employees feel with the work they do as well as their company’s broader mission, objectives, and values.

This dimension of staff engagement is vital because it contributes to how motivated and fulfilled employees feel at their workplace. It also relates to how secure they feel about their future with their employer.

Staff engagement takes on a slightly different meaning on a micro-level. It relates to how enthusiastic, excited, and connected employees feel with their work on a day-to-day basis.

Highly-engaged employees in this sense feel empowered and excited about the work they do and make their workplace a great place to be. Disengaged employees will feel bored and like they’re just trying to get through another workday.

Both of these meanings are connected and are equally essential to fostering an ideal work environment and company culture. The statistics speak for themselves:

Companies with highly engaged employees are as much as 21% more profitable than their competition.
Employee engagement levels contribute to everything from productivity to customer ratings to reduced absenteeism.
Disengaged employees are huge money-wasters. In fact, disengaged individuals can cost their companies about a third of their yearly salary.

How presentations can improve staff engagement

There are many ways that presentations can improve staff engagement in any workplace, especially the “micro” variety. Discover what they are below.

1. Make dynamic internal communications with presentation software like Pitch

By far, effective internal communication is one of the biggest contributing factors to staff engagement. In fact, it motivates 85% of employees to become more engaged in their workplace.

Internal communications take many different forms including newsletters, posters, and knowledge bases, but one of the most underrated varieties is presentations. Presentations tend to get a bad reputation because of the boring PowerPoints many people had to sit through in their school years.

However, there are modern presentation tools out there that can help you put together stunning presentations that will wow and engage any crowd.

Pitch is an excellent online tool that takes the best aspects of productivity, design, and presentation software and brings them together into one innovative package. They make it easy to create presentations filled with stunning media, dynamic elements, and captivating design in no time.

Best of all, Pitch presentations are highly interactive, so they feel more like projects than presentations and even leave room for participants to add reactions and comments.

Pitch presentations are also perfect for different situations: team meetings, workshops, pitch and proposal meetings, briefs, moodboard creation, product releases, and more. Create a presentation with Pitch and discover the brilliant presentation templates they have to help you get started.

2. Foster a sense of community and connection

Presentations are an underrated tool for fostering a sense of community and connection within your team, which go a long way towards making them feel more engaged overall.

Nowadays, it’s harder for employees to feel connected with their professional community. Many people spend lots of their working hours by themselves and are part of teams that work remotely and asynchronously.

This isn’t a bad thing, but it means that companies need to be more mindful about making their employees feel like they’re a part of a community.

Here are just a few ways that internal presentations can enrich professional communities:

Integrate team-building activities into presentations. They don’t have to be anything overly long, complicated, or fancy. Try asking trivia questions, doing quick individual or team check-ins, guiding a quick meditation, or starting a compliment circle. Of course, the specifics all depend on the size of your team.
Start or conclude meetings with employee recognition. Choosing an employee of the month or offering shout-outs to teams who are doing a great job or otherwise embodying your company values boosts morale and builds closer personal ties between coworkers. Employee recognition is also a huge driving force behind staff engagement.
Reinforce company-wide objectives and values. Everything your company does should relate back to your guiding mission and long-term objectives. This should be clear in your meetings! You can do this by including slides in your presentation, discussing it as a group, or asking questions.

3. Bring remote and global teams together

Building off our last point, it can be a challenge to engage staff members when they’re spread all around the world. This is becoming increasingly common and will continue to be the case in the years to come.

In fact, 45% of American full-time employees were working remotely either full-time or part-time as of September 2021.

Luckily, presentations are a staff engagement strategy that can work no matter where your employees are located.

Of course, any old run-of-the-mill presentation won’t do the trick when it comes to bringing remote teams together. Here are a few strategies you can implement that will make your global team feel united and engaged after participating in one of your presentations:

Make them inclusive. If you want your presentation to truly engage staff and capture their attention, you’ll need to make sure that they’re relevant to all the employees that are participating in them. Don’t focus on one culture, geographic location, or work set-up; be sure to touch on all that are relevant.
Ensure that they’re available after the fact: Because remote teams are usually spread across different time zones, it might not be realistic for all employees to tune into a presentation at the same time. In order to account for this, make sure that your presentations are available after that fact so they can be reviewed asynchronously.
Encourage mingling: Try integrating activities and brainstorming sessions in your presentations that allow employees to connect with coworkers they don’t normally engage with.

4. Keep employees well-informed

All in all, an engaged employee has to be a well-informed employee. If your employees don’t know what’s going on in your company, it will be impossible for them to feel highly engaged.

There are many different ways to keep your employees well-informed: blogging tools, email newsletters, informal conversations, and team meetings are some of the most common strategies.

Presentations are also a fantastic, underutilized way to provide employees with all the essential information they need.

Next time you’re thinking about sending out an email about reviewing guidelines and expectations or announcing a new project, ask yourself if the information you’re sharing would be better communicated through a dynamic presentation.

We can guarantee that it’d be more engaging, that’s for sure.

Use presentation to kick your staff engagement up a notch

High levels of staff engagement are essential for any business, but there are many different ways to get there.

People often talk about staff engagement in relation to a company’s “big picture.” While that’s important, there’s a lot that can be done to foster high engagement levels on a day-to-day basis as well.

Remember, presentations can improve staff engagement levels because they:

Make for dynamic internal communications
Foster and sense of community and connection
Bring remote and global teams together
Keep employees well-informed

Presentations are one unexpected strategy that can truly make an impact on staff engagement and we’d encourage you to see what they can do for your business.

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Author bio:

Sydney Triggs is a content writer, editor & educator from Vancouver, Canada currently settled in Barcelona, Spain. She’s written hundreds of articles about marketing, travel & leisure, fashion, sustainability, technology, finance & investment, remote work and human resources, as well as more personal fiction and thought pieces.