Attention Please: How to Be an Effective Presenter

We all have our favorite places in the office. Many would probably say the pantry because the work stops there. Kidding aside, the meeting room is one place where everyone can be huddled and have important conversations about work and the company. It's the room where everyone can have meaningful interaction with each other without being limited by the divider of a cubicle. Thus, it is necessary to make it a comfortable place. It has to be furnished with sturdy furniture. There are high-quality boardroom chairs in London that you can purchase for your office. Team members can settle in easy during meetings where they are seated comfortably.

Meetings can be a waste of time if the attendees are bored or uninterested. But there are many ways you can spice up your presentation. Here are some suggestions:

Nail the Beginning

If you want to catch the attention of your listeners, do it at the start of your presentation. This is how you can control the pacing of the meeting. Just like an entertaining movie, you should make the introduction exciting and, at the same time, provide details of the things to come. Your attendees should have a good feeling of anticipation instead of thinking about when the meeting will end. Once you achieve this, you can slow down and focus on details during the middle parts. Interested listeners will sit through that if they are waiting for a satisfying payoff.

Encourage Participation

All of you are adults in the room, so it is just right to ask for everyone's participation. This is not a break from work, after all. This is also a way for you to gauge how much everyone has learned. If in case there are those who might be straying away by being bored, this will pull them back into the conversation.

Spruce up the Presentation

Do not limit your presentation to slides. These could end up as screens that people stare at until the meeting is done. You are still the presenter, so you have to make your presentation be about you as much as its topic. Check how you have outlined this. If you can get away with using the main points of this as your slides, do so. 

Do not feed all the information as reading material. For example, if you have a shortlist of terms that you want to discuss, list only the words and then keep the definition for yourself. These are what you will speak about and explain to your listeners. It's a generic sample, but it's a principle you can apply to other topics. 

Sometimes you need to step back from the presentation to maintain variety. You can't force everyone to like you. To keep a nice pace going, you can also incorporate various media such as sound clips and videos. This should maintain everyone's attention.

Meetings sometimes get a bad reputation from some employees, but you have the power to change that perception. You were that kind of employee once too, so you know how bad it can be. With these tips and your experience, you should be able to pull off a great one.

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