Practical Tips to Enhance Your Employees’ Presentational Skills

Read Time: 4 minutes

You aren’t the only person your employees might one day have to deliver a business presentation to. Employees may need to present in front of potential investors, clients, new team members they’re onboarding, and other such parties.

You want to be confident they’ll make an ideal impression when they do. However, maybe you’re worried their presentational skills are currently lacking.

They don’t have to stay that way. If your goal is to boost the presentational skills of your workers, consider following these steps to do so:

Assessing Current Skill Levels

You need to have a clear sense of where your employees’ presentational skills currently are before you can decide how to improve upon them. To begin, task your employees with giving brief presentations during which you may evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.

Consider distributing surveys to employees as well. Encourage them to use these surveys as an opportunity to self-assess their presentational skills.

Developing Clear Objectives and Goals

Once you know the current status of your workforce’s presentational skills, you can begin to set specific goals. Potential objectives you might set include:

Helping employees convey a greater sense of confidence when presenting
Teaching employees to modulate their voices
Improving upon the actual content of employee presentations

Those are merely examples. The goals you set will depend on the areas where your employees may need to make improvements.

Providing Training and Resources

Don’t merely tell your employees they need to work on certain aspects of their presentational skills. Organize training sessions and provide employees with access to resources they can use to make the necessary improvements.

This can also be an indirect way to boost employee engagement. Research shows that employees are more likely to be engaged when they feel their employers have provided them with the resources they need to optimize their potential.

Crafting Engaging Content

Some employees may feel discouraged when they are forced to admit their presentational skills need work. Guard against this by reminding employees that fear of public speaking or lack of charisma on stage are by no means the only factors influencing the quality of a presentation. Sometimes, a presentation doesn’t make the right impression on an audience because the content itself is lacking.

Teaching employees to improve their presentational skills doesn’t just involve teaching them to relax in front of others. It also involves teaching them to develop eye-catching content.

For example, studies show that video content drives high levels of engagement on social media. It’s safe to assume video content would have the same impact in the context of a presentation. Thus, you might train employees to naturally incorporate videos into their presentations.

Practicing Delivery and Confidence

Your employees need to know what strong presentational skills look like before they can make the necessary improvements to their own skills. To help your workers learn how to correct their delivery, consider showing them videos of charismatic individuals delivering different types of presentations. Watch these videos together and discuss what factors made these presenters stand out.

From there, you can organize practice sessions in which employees focus specifically on improving their overall confidence and delivery. Tips that might help them include:

Adopting proud but natural body language doesn’t just tell others you’re confident—research indicates it can actually make a person feel more confident. By pretending to feel comfortable in front of others, your employees might genuinely become more comfortable.
Rehearsal is key. Anyone is more likely to come across as confident when delivering a presentation if they feel they thoroughly know the material.
A consistent tone of voice is monotonous over time. This is true even if a tone sounds enthusiastic at first. Remind your employees of this.
For those who struggle quite a bit with anxiety when delivering a presentation, practicing deep breathing exercises a few minutes before a presentation can be surprisingly helpful.

Improving Communication and Interpersonal Skills

Improving overall communication skills can translate to improving one’s presentational skills. This is another instance in which helping employees develop presentational skills can yield benefits in other areas of their work.

Tips your employees can apply to improve communication and interpersonal skills include the following:

Learn to listen as much as you speak. In the context of a presentation, an employee will likely be doing most of the talking, but having strong listening skills can nevertheless help them learn to pay attention to their audience’s mood during a presentation.
Emphasize clarity and concision. Your employees should be able to say what they mean in clear terms that don’t result in any misunderstandings.
Learning how to remain calm and communicate compassionately will help employees during arguments and other such conflicts. Being able to calm oneself is also extremely helpful in regard to presentational skills.

Evaluating Progress and Celebrating Achievements

After all practice presentations, sit down with your employees to discuss how you think they did and how they think they did. It’s important to be honest during this stage. If your goal is to truly perfect the presentational skills of your employees, you need to tell them the truth when explaining whether they’ve made improvements or whether more work needs to be done.

That said, it’s also very important to recognize any and all achievements. Remember, developing presentational skills takes time.

You don’t want your employees to feel discouraged. Ensure you know, and they know they’re making progress by pointing out when they’ve done so. This will help them stay focused and motivated. With sufficient practice, your team will feel comfortable delivering presentations to business partners, new customers, and you.

Use Powtoon to Generate Presentation Videos

Your employees will feel much more confident in their presentational skills if they have strong visual aids to go along with their presentations. With Powtoon, they can create dynamic slideshows and pro-quality videos, even if they don’t have video production experience or a large budget. Learn more about what Powtoon can do for you and your team by signing up today!

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Hanna Abitbul

Hanna is Powtoon's Content Marketing Strategist. She joined Powtoon as a copywriter in 2019, after graduating from university with a specialized degree in marketing and business. She continues to inspire people to create incredible video content with blog posts, videos, guides, and more. Hanna's passions include reading, singing, and caring for animals (#proudvegan). Nothing makes her happier than waking up to her two black kitties who, contrary to popular belief, are good luck!