Etiket arşivi: Presentation Training in Istanbul

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 Gittigidiyor.com project

Milyonlarca insanın güvenle alışveriş yaptığı e-ticaret platformu Gittigidiyor.com, yöneticilerinin İngilizce sunum becerilerini Speak & More ile geliştiriyor!

Bir Ebay Inc. şirketi olan Gittigidiyor.com, İstanbul ofisindeki yöneticileri için Speak & More un özel bir programını uyguluyor. Uzman eğitmenlerin nezaretinde iki gün süren ‘English Presentation Skills Workshop’u ile yöneticiler İngilizcede etkili sunum yapma becerilerini arttırırken, yabancı meslektaşlarıyla iş yaparken kendilerini daha rahat ve hazır hissediyorlar.

Ebay Murat Bey

Gittigidiyor.com ülkemizdeki hızlı büyümesini devam ettirirken, kritik görevlerde bulunan yöneticilerimizin yabancı meslektaşları ve iş ortaklarıyla olan temaslarında yüksek kalitede iletişim kurmalarını istiyoruz. Bu amaçla, Speak & More ile gerçekleştirdiğimiz ‘English Presentation Skills Workshoplarıyla’ yöneticilerin sunum becerilerinde tatmin edici gelişmeler kaydettik.

Yöneticilerimizin İngilizce sunumlarında izleyenler üzerinde güçlü bir etki bırakmakları ve kendilerini en iyi şekilde ifade etmeleri hepimizi memnun etmiştir. Profesyonel gelişime destek olan bu popüler programı gerçekleştirmekten ve güzel sonuçlar almaktan mutluyuz.”

Murat Yüksel
My HR Manager – Turkey

 

Speak & More is proud to present Denizbank Power Business English Program

Denizbank kısa zamanda gelişme kaydetmeleri gereken çalışanlarının İş İngilizcesini yüksek verim sunan “Power Business English Workshop programıyla destekliyor.

İki ay süren gelişim projesinde, ayda iki tam gün yoğunlaştırılmış workshoplar düzenleniyor. Bu sayede, Denizbank çalışanları İngilizce konuşma,yazma ve sunum becerilerini özel uygulamalarla kolayca geliştiriyorlar. Yabancı uzmanlar eşliğinde, İş İngilizcesi konuşma ve sunum becerilerini kısa zamanda gözle görülür bir şekilde ilerletme imkanına kavuşuyorlar.

Speak & More firmasıyla yapmış olduğumuz Power Business English eğitimlerimizde katılımcılarımızın hem teknik hem de pratik olarak İngilizce seviyelerine katkıda bulunduk. Kurumumuzun beklentileri ve görüşleri doğrultusunda Speak & More ile başarılı bir sinerji yarattık.’’

EzgiG

Ezgi Gümüştekin
Deniz Akademi Gelişim Yönetmeni

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.

Speak & More presents Alternatif Bank Project

Alternatif Bank, finans sektörüne ve ülke ekonomisine yaptığı değerli katkılarla yoluna emin adımlarla devam etmektedir. Alternatif Bank, 2013 yılında daha güçlü bir yapıya kavuşmak ve daha fazla müşteriye hizmet edebilmek amacıyla, Commercial Bank of Qatar ile ortaklık anlaşması imza etmiştir. 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!
Alternatif Bank, yeni yabancı ortaklı yapısında yöneticilerinin iş İngilizcesi konuşma becerileriniSpeak & 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.

Bahar Mete Baran“Dünya standartlarında kaliteli bankacılık hizmetini müşterilerimize sunma stratejimiz, alanımızda daha aktif rol almamızı gerektirmektedir. 
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. 

Çalışanların altı aylık programlara azalmayan bir ilgiyle devam etmeleri, bu özel programı kişisel gelişimleri için ne kadar önemsediklerini bize göstermiştir. Değer yaratan ve çalışanlar arasında popüler olan bir gelişim programına destek vermekten ve güzel sonuçlar almaktan memnunuz.”

Bahar Mete Baran
Eğitim Müdürü
ABANK

Speak & More presents MSC Turkey Project

mersin I (6)MSC Türkiye, satış ekibi ve satış yöneticilerinden oluşan 120 çalışanına 6 ay süren özel bir proje kapsamında Speak & More İngilizce sunum teknikleri eğitimini aldırdı. İstanbul, İzmir, Bursa ve Mersin lokasyonlarında gerçekleşen seminerler sonucunda, katılımcılar İngilizce etkili sunum hazırlamanın ve yabancı iş ortaklarını kolayca etkilemenin yollarını öğrendiler.

IST III (3)MSC Türkiye ekibinin dünya standartlarında İş İngilizcesi gelişimine destek olmaktan Speak & More olarak gurur duyuyoruz.

“Speak & More ile eğitim verdikleri bir firmanın referansı vesilesi ile tanıştık. 2012 yılında 6 aylık süreç içerisinde Tüm Satış ekibimiz ve Satış Yöneticilerimiz için İngilizce Sunum Teknikleri eğitimini gerçekleştirdik.

Katılımcılarımıza eğitim davetini ilettiğimiz günlerde, eğitimin içeriği, derinliği ve yaratacağı fayda hakkında tereddütler vardı, ta ki ilk grubun eğitimi gerçekleşene kadar. Eğitimin içeriğinde yer alan her bir sözcük gerçekten de iş yaşamımızda etkin kullanabileceğimiz bilgilerle doluydu.

Serap Tosun“Biz zaten yıllardır sunum yapıyoruz ve İngilizcemiz de gayet iyi” duygusuyla eğitime giden katılımcılarımızın tamamından sözlü veya yazılı teşekkür mesajları aldık. Verdikleri geri bildirimde, son derece faydalı bilgiler edindiklerini, kendi becerileri hakkında ciddi farkındalık kazandıklarını, aktarılan bilgileri yalnızca sunum sırasında değil, günlük iş akışının her anında da kullanabildiklerini ifade ettiler.

Speak & More’a gelişimimize sağladıkları katkı, profesyonel ancak içten ve samimi yaklaşımları için teşekkür ederiz.”

Serap Tosun
İnsan Kaynakları Müdürü 
MSC Gemi Acenteliği A.Ş.