Etiket arşivi: business english coaching turkey

Running Effective Meetings in English

Meeting 2There are good meetings and there are bad meetings. Bad meetings drone on forever, you never seem to get to the point, and you leave wondering why you were even present. Effective ones leave you energized and feeling that you’ve really accomplished something.

Meetings fill an increasing number of hours in the workday, and yet most employees consider them as a waste of time. Meetings can be ranked as the number one office productivity killer when we make a survey with our workshop participants.

But there are ways to run effective, efficient meetings in English that leave your employees feeling energized and excited about their work.

Here are some useful tips:

  1.  Make your objective clear

    A meeting must have a specific and defined purpose. Before you send that calendar invite, ask yourself: “What do I seek to accomplish?” Are you alerting people to a change in management or a shift in strategy? Are you seeking input from others on a problem facing the company? Are you looking to arrive at a decision on a particular matter? Standing meetings with vague purposes, such as “status updates,” are rarely a good use of time.

  2. Consider who is invited 

    When you’re calling a meeting, take time to think about who really needs to be there. If you’re announcing a change, invite the people who are affected by the announcement. If you’re trying to solve a problem, invite the people who will be good sources of information for a solution. When people feel that what’s being discussed isn’t relevant to them, or that they lack the skills or expertise to be of assistance, they’ll view their attendance at the meeting as a waste of time.

  3. Stick to your schedule

    Create an agenda that lays out everything you plan to cover in the meeting, along with a timeline that allots a certain number of minutes to each item, and email it to people in advance. Once you’re in the meeting, put that agenda up on a screen or whiteboard for others to see. This keeps people focused.

  4. Take no hostages 

    Nothing derails a meeting faster than one person talking more than his fair share. If you notice one person monopolizing the conversation, call him out. Say, “We appreciate your contributions, but now we need input from others before making a decision.” Be public about it. Establishing ground rules early on will create a framework for how your group functions.

  5. Start on time, end on time

    If you have responsibility for running regular meetings and you have a reputation for being someone who starts and ends promptly, you will be amazed how many of your colleagues will make every effort to attend your meetings. People appreciate it when you understand that their time is valuable. Another note on time: Do not schedule any meeting to last longer than an hour. Sixty minutes is generally the longest time workers can remain truly engaged.

     6. Follow up

It’s quite common for people to come away from the same meeting with very different interpretations of what went on. To reduce this risk, email a memo highlighting what was accomplished to all who attended within 24 hours after the meeting. Document the responsibilities given, tasks delegated, and any assigned deadlines. That way, everyone will be on the same page.

Meetings truly can be valuable and productive. You just have to take the steps to make them that way. For further information, you can always call us (Speakandmore.com).

Çiğdem Karabel

Managing Director

Speak & More

Speak & More is proud to present Burgan Bank Project

Burgan Bank 2012 yılında Eurobank Tekfen’in çoğunluk hissesine sahip olarak, Türkiye’de Burgan Bank A.Ş. olarak bankacılık faaliyetlerine başlamıştır. Orta Doğu ve Kuzey Afrika bölgesinde bankacılık alanında lider konumda olan Burgan Bank kurumsal, ticari ve kobi müşterilerine özel ürünler ve hizmetler sunmaktadır.

Burgan Bank, bankacılık sektöründe güçlü bir oyuncu olma ve hedef pazarlarda hızlı büyüme stratejisi çerçevesinde kritik öneme sahip pozisyonlardaki çalışanlarının İş İngilizcesini Speak & More ile geliştirme kararı almıştır!

Burgan Bank, yeni yabancı ortaklı yapısında yöneticilerinin iş İngilizcesi konuşma becerilerini Speak & More‘un özel bir programıyla destekliyor. “Business English Group Training” projesiyle yöneticiler etkili konuşma becerilerini geliştirirken, yabancı meslektaşlarıyla çalışırken kendilerini daha rahat ve hazır hissediyorlar.

Yeliz Erbaş“Dünya standartlarında kaliteli bankacılık hizmetini müşterilerimize sunma stratejimiz, yetkinlikleri yüksek çalışanlara sahip olmamızı gerektiriyor.
Kritik görevlerde bulunan çalışanlarımızın yabancı meslektaşları ve iş ortaklarıyla olan temaslarında yüksek kalitede iletişim kurmalarını istiyoruz. Bu amaçla, Speak & More ile gerçekleştirdiğimiz İş İngilizcesi gelişim projesinde, katılımcıların konuşma becerilerinde gözle görülür bir iyileşme elde ettik.

Değer yaratan ve çalışanlar arasında popüler olan bir gelişim programına destek vermekten ve güzel sonuçlar almaktan memnunuz.”

Yeliz Erbaş
Birim Yöneticisi
Eğitim ve Gelişim

How to Improve Your Presentation Skills

Your presentations skills are as important as the information you are presenting. This guide will help you prepare for a presentation and polish your speaking skills for a successful pitch. 

Yeni Resim

The opportunity to pitch your services to a potential client, spell out your business plan to a potential business partner, or promote your business at an event may require that you give a presentation. Whether or not your presentation achieves its desired outcome can be affected by your skills as a speaker, so it’s important to step in front of your audience with your best foot forward. As Speakandmore, we explain how to prepare, deliver, and answer questions about a stellar presentation.

Preparation

1) Research your audience. Knowing the needs of your audience can help you tailor your presentation to target their interests and explain how your company can be of use in their specific situation.

2) Structuring your presentation. The classic format is to tell them what you’re going to say, present, and then tell them what you told them, What we advise is to start off with the benefits of what you’re going to say, the benefits to the audience, and then present and review.

  • Opening. Your opening should be something that makes an emotional connection with the audience.  It can be a story, a question, or a shocking static. It should not be an introduction of yourself or five minutes of thank-you. Any stories you use should represent your audience’s position in life and should use characters that are analogous to your audience.
  • Body. Try to stick to your three most important points. It’s more important to engage the audience than to tell them everything you know. You will need to leave some information out, but it is likely that what you don’t cover in the presentation will come up when you take questions. Keep your outcome in mind. You don’t have to write out your presentation word for word (or worse, memorize it) if you just remember to keep going back to your main points and working toward your desired outcome. Be prepared to present both sides of an issue. You’ll appear more credible if you acknowledge your competitors or any opposing arguments. After you’ve explained the other side, you can spell out exactly why your company is better or your argument is stronger.
  • Closing. The closing of your presentation is the last opportunity you have to give your audience something that will stick in their minds. You can go back to your opening or end on a clever slogan or a call to action.  When making a business proposal, you end on a positive forecast. Your forecast will provide fodder that can serve to validate any subconsciously generated optimism.

3) Practice, practice, practice…but don’t memorize. If you practice your speech only once, you’re going to stink. Starting to rehearse your presentation about a month in advance. You can talk into a mirror, talk to a wall, or ask a family member to listen. Do whatever works for you, but make sure it includes practicing out loud so that you can get a sense of timing.

  • Rehearsing does not mean memorization. Memorizing your speech can make you sound mechanical and over-rehearsed. Really the only people who are good at memorizing things are actors, If you’re going to do it well, you actually have to act it out and play a character, and most speakers aren’t very good at that. Even if you are good at acting, you don’t memorize your speech to perfection. When an individual is too polished, it makes them relatively inaccessible in the mind of the audience. The audience is human at the end of the day, and this person doesn’t seem to be like them.  It really retards the rapport building process.
  • Videotape yourself. You can’t know how you come off to people until you see it. Recording yourself is the best way to target the areas where you can improve.
  • Calm your nerves. Changing the word ‘presentation’ to ‘conversation’ when thinking about your big day. Feel better yet? If not, you can also quell panic by conditioning yourself to be in presentation-mode.
  • Stop working on it. You really need time to start getting into relaxation mode. You can’t be in your hyper rewriting, restructuring mode right up to your presentation. Take a couple of days to relax before your speech.

Delivery

1) Verbal Delivery

  • Be Brief. The average adult was able to focus on a loading web page for only four to eight seconds before looking somewhere else. Attention spans are short; don’t dwell on a specific subject too long.
  • Ask questions to keep the audience engaged. This can be something as simple as pausing to ask if your audience understands everything you’ve presented so far.
  • Speak to your demographic. Match the semantics of your audience as closely as possible. Speak their language. If you’re selling a new video game, for instance, your semantics are going to be a lot different than if you’re working with a litigation attorney.
  • Work on your tone. Evolutionary psychology suggests that people of both sexes respond better to deep male voices and high female voices. It takes practice to change the tone of your voice, but it can be done.
  • Avoid speaking softly or other speech patterns that make you seem unconfident. For example, avoid ending sentences in an escalating tone that suggests every sentence you speak is a question.
  • You should avoid words like ‘umm’, ‘uhh’. One strategy for kicking a fill-word habit: Say the offending word and concentrate on it.Then tell yourself, ‘this is a fill word, I’m avoiding this”. When you say this, it creates that pattern of changing it so that you’ll catch yourself when you start saying it.
  • Don’t use words like ” don’t “. It’s important to avoid phrases like “don’t worry”. Tell your audience what they should do instead. Similarly, don’t say “I hope you will enjoy this presentation”. Say, “I am confident that you will enjoy this presentation.”

2) Body Language

  • Stand at a comfortable distance. Remaining within 2.5 – 7 feet of your audience. This presupposes (at a subconscious level) a personal to social relationship.
  • Eye contact. Don’t surf the audience with your eyes.  Rather, make eye contact with one person at a time.
  • Appear confident:

a. Shoulders back

b. Arms at your sides or held in front of your body when making gestures

c. Hands open or only slightly closed

d. Smile slightly or keep your face neutral.

e. Take long strides

f. Make every movement purposeful and decided

g. Treat props (like your resume or a handout) as though they are of value.  Don’t let a paper in your hand flap back and forth carelessly.

3) Powerpoint

  • A Good Powerpoint…
  1. Relies heavily on images.
  2. Has only one or two sentences per slide.
  3. Entertains.
  4. Enhances your presentation, but doesn’t summarize it.
  • A Bad Powerpoint…
  1. Contains font smaller than 32pt.
  2. Has more than five or six lines of text per slide.
  3. Displays a logo on every slide (your audience won’t forget who you are).
  4. Is printed and distributed as a handout.

Questions

Being prepared to answer questions plays a major role in appearing credible to your audience.

Taking questions before the end of your presentation. You’ll have to let the audience know that you plan to continue after questions so that they don’t start packing up their things, but this approach allows you to close your presentation on your own note. The audience will leave with your final message in their minds instead of some random question that someone asked that maybe was off-topic.

For further details you can always contact us in order to boost your presentation skills and impress your audience.