Focus on our presentation skills course

Unbeknown to many of our customers, Emailogic have been delivering Presentation Skills courses for over a decade. Many of our trainers are ex-actors so they have plenty of specialist experience around presenting and working an audience.

One point we cover is some extraordinary research about nerves and anxiety - even senior managers who have been presenting for decades get excited about this. The research proves that nerves are good – a powerful energy that can be used to really drive your presentation.

What is not good, and has been proved with a study including 30,000 adults spanning 8 years, is if you relate negatively to nervousness and anxiety. If you expereince nerves as a bad thing – it can negatively impact your physiology – so much so that your attitude towards nerves can actually make you unwell. It can even shorten your life! However, having a positive attitude to nerves has no negative impact – in fact it can even make you live longer.

So the next time you are about to give a presentation and you feel nervous, rather than thinking that feeling is negative, consider how you can use that nervous energy to:

-          Enhance your presentation

-          Really serve your audience

-          Handle interaction and potential difficult questions

In fact the feeling of nervousness is strangely similar to feeling excited.

If you want to learn more about the research above watch Kelly McGonigal’s Tedtalk by clicking here

If you would like to know more about Emailogic’s Presentation Skills session, just contact us on form provided on this newsletter - alternatively call us 0203 154 6611 or email enquiries@emailogic.com

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Emailogic Insights, our quarterly newsletter which aims to give you regular updates about what we’ve been up to, and to highlight workplace trends and insights we are seeing across our work in all sectors to help inform your L&D planning.

2023 was an extremely busy year for Emailogic as we continued to develop our portfolio of off the shelf soft-skills courses (we now have 34 to choose from), while also fulfilling customer requests for bespoke sessions. Among many highlights, two which stood out were:

·       Rolling out an Active Bystander programme for a multi-national household name, reaching over 700 delegates with in-person sessions, and achieving a 90% plus approval rating (a clear 10 points above the client’s typical training providers)

·       Working with a huge utility provider (and co-designing with other training providers) to help re-shape their L&D offering, we helped improve their staff’s ability to connect and learn, so people are inspired to learn and know how to shape their own learning journeys.

In this issue you can read about our passion for supporting companies in their drive for greater Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. You can also discover more about our highly popular Presentation Skills course, and the recently created Professional Telephone Skills training.

We love to hear from our clients, who range from SMEs to global brands, and are proud of the great connections we develop which give us access to the latest trends across all sectors. If you’ve got an idea you’d like to talk through, or a problem you need to fix, give us a call. In the meantime, have a great Christmas and our best wishes for a joyful and healthy 2024!

The case for improving Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in your business

There are some fascinating facts about equality, diversity, and inclusion (ED&I) in the workplace. For example, while the gap between female and male employment rates in the UK is the lowest since it was first recorded in 1971, as recently as 2018 FTSE 100 CEOs in 2018 were more likely to be called Dave or Steve than be female!

According to the CIPD, ED&I is “about creating working environments and cultures where every individual can feel safe and a sense of belonging and is empowered to achieve their full potential” (CIPD Factsheet, November 2022). But why should we spend precious time and scarce resources in pursuing this culture development as a priority?

There is the obvious Legal Case for this. Ever since the Magna Carta in 2015, there have been laws in the UK to further equality. In recent times, the 1965 Race Relations Act was the precursor to 45 years of equality and diversity legislation voted in by successive governments of all hues, leading up to the 2010 Equalities Act which identifies nine protected characteristics such as sex and race.

Then there is an overwhelmingly strong Business Case for becoming more equal, diverse and inclusive in your business. Corporations identified as more diverse and inclusive are 35% more likely to outperform their competitors (McKinsey), diverse teams are 87% better at making decisions (People Management), and inclusive companies get 2.3 times more cash flow per employee (Josh Bersin).

But probably the biggest driver for greater ED&I in your workplace is the Ethical Case. Why shouldn’t all employees in the 21st century feel valued and a sense of belonging in work? And why shouldn’t companies strive to shape their corner of the collective culture to be fairer and more reflective of their local populations? As the CIPD says, “creating shared value and distributing it to various stakeholders in its different forms is more important than driving business performance for financial stakeholders alone”. We run regular Discussion Forums for leading L&D practitioners and were delighted when a delegate said their retail company runs a ‘Joy at Work’ survey. We spend a third of our adult lives in work, so why shouldn’t the experience be joyful?

You can probably tell that we are passionate about helping our clients in the ED&I space. We are increasingly being asked to provide training programmes to improve workplace ED&I. This began with our highly successful Active Bystander course, which we’ve now rolled out to dozens of organisations across all sectors. Following this, a large European bank requested we roll-out psychological safety training. And now, forming a 3-part ED&I programme, we have created an Introduction to ED&I course. If you would like to find out more, contact us 0203 154 6611 or email enquiries@emailogic.com

Contact us to discuss your training plans:

What are your plans for 2024?

We’ve been working with a world leading health regulator this week, with front line managers (and soon to be managers), exploring the skills required to excel in today’s complex corporate and individual environment. It’s not just ‘what’ delegates take away from the highly interactive live virtual sessions - it’s the group exploration of ‘why bother to learn about leadership and management in the first place?’.

At Emailogic, in the last year we’ve been questioning and probing the value of traditional learning interventions. Do people still want, need, or value live facilitators? Maybe it’s all about internal Learning Experience Platforms. Or AI? Or gamification?

At its heart, effective learning has to start with a purpose and a will. Our 90 minute highly interactive management and leadership sessions ignite that fire in your people to learn more. How do we know? A key measure is simply the amount of questions and interaction we have with delegates. And importantly, we reinforce this will by then exploring the ‘how to learn’ competencies.

We are proud to be supporting another leading UK organisation in beginning the journey towards bottom-up learning. Courses are not simply put on for a perceived demand which is sometimes not fulfilled but are reshaped and fine-honed and collated into a programme which ignites passion and is the start of a personalised and individually owned learning journey.

When thinking about your training plans for 2024, and once you’ve collated the date to compete a gap analysis, consider that transition to a world where all your people know what they want to learn. A world where they know how they personally best learn. And most importantly they have a deep and energised passion to learn in the first place.

 We are an agile, energetic, effective, and dynamic learning and development consultancy, supplemented by a large network of world class associates. And we’d love to speak to you about your plans for 2024 and beyond.

Why not book a place on our upcoming discussion forums - see topics below

There will be discussions on various topics where you can learn from others and network with HR and L&D peers