The power of storytelling in the remote workspace
Why you should care about your slides
For awhile now, I’ve been a stickler for aesthetically pleasing presentations. Fonts and font sizes must be consistent, headings and margins should be aligned across pages, and colors should stick to a theme. I will notice that one picture that’s shifted slightly off the center line and cringe internally. Maybe you think this is extreme, that this level of polished is not worth the time, or that what really matters is the content on the slides. I urge you to think twice about that. In the remainder of this piece, I’ll share some things I’ve learned recently in hopes of convincing you to spend a little extra time putting together your next presentation. In particular, I’ll tie this skill to the new normal of the remote work environment and how I’ve come to find storytelling even more important when you can’t be with your co-workers in-person.
A presentation gone awry
Half way through my virtual internship, I was asked to prepare a few slides to update the greater team on the work I’d been doing and some interesting things I discovered. The meeting where I planned to share these slides was scheduled for an hour and a half. The meeting starts, and we begin on the first slide. The slide featured three bulleted lists of size 12 font that completely filled the screen. There was enough content on the one slide for the entire meeting–and it nearly was. The team spent 40 minutes talking about the first slide. Maybe it was just me, but I stopped paying attention to the presentation after minute 5 on the same slide. This pained me. During this time, my teammate messaged me privately to say that there would not be enough time for my slides since we were behind schedule. To be honest, I was disappointed. I had a really good story and was excited to share it. And it wasn’t just me that was affected by spending 40 minutes on one slide. Additionally, it took too long to realize we needed to keep the presentation moving. The remainder of the slides were rushed and things were overlooked.
I will acknowledge that this meeting was the first of its kind, so there was a major learning curve to the time and formatting for the presentation. But nevertheless, I think it’s a great opportunity to show how to improve storytelling. And, I know I’m not the only one who has witnessed a presentation that has gone awry.
Make it digestible
The less content on a slide, the better. The average human attention span is 8 seconds. Ask yourself: What is the most important piece of information this slide needs to convey? And there should only be one important piece of information per slide. I’ve been told you should stay on a slide at most one minute before moving on. This has proven to be good advice. If you need to tell your audience to save their questions and comments until you get through a section, do that. Do what you need to keep the presentation moving and everyone on the same page.
Make it a story
How do you not lose the audience by slide 3? Tell a story–one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. You don’t have to be J.K. Rowling to be able to create a storyline for your presentation. One of the simplest ways to work on improving your story for a presentation is to use a tool called a Story Spine. The Story Spine was developed to give structure to creating a story and has been used by playwrights. It goes like this:
Once upon a time… (introduction to customer/persona)
Every day… (routine)
But one day… (event that breaks the routine)
Because of that… (pain point)
Because of that… (pain point)
Because of that… (pain point)
Until finally… (a solution)
And ever since then… (new routine)
By following this structure, you can create a story that puts the customer at the center of your presentation. However, don’t feel like you have to be rigid in maintaining this outline for your story. Adapt this methodology to your needs or use something else entirely. Having a story laid out like this will directly transition into making slides for your presentation and save time when it comes to putting the slides together.
Make it polished
You don’t have to be a visual designer to make nice looking slides. To me, having a polished presentation comes down to this: If you put tons of time and effort into gathering the content that you’re going to share, you should put the same amount of time and effort in making sure it’s presentable. Else, you’re doing a disservice to all the work you did to get to the point of presenting.
At a minimum, proofread, use consistent colors and fonts, use the gridlines to help align content, and limit the amount of text on a single slide. If you feel like you need a lot of text, try breaking one slide into three slides and replacing words with images, icons, graphs or other visuals. And, there’s no need to use the same layout for every slide. Change it up! Keep the people engaged. If your presentation is quite long, try breaking it up with section title slides. An agenda at the start of your presentation will also help everyone with pacing if you have lots of slides to get through.
F the script
Don’t read from a script. A script can be useful for planning what you want to mention on each slide, but reading from a script sounds robotic and is a surefire way to lose your audience. You want to know your slides so well that you don’t need notes. One thing I like to do to make sure I don’t forget an important point is to have enough words on the slide to trigger my comments about a point. Also, if you’re into animations, they can help you move through a slide as well.
Why storytelling matters even more right now
While many companies are still working remote, and plan to continue to allow their employees to work remotely for the foreseeable future, storytelling has an increased power in rallying the troops around the problems and solutions. I found that it was much harder to share insights regarding a customer problem when stakeholders could not simply walk by my workspace. Instead, most interactions are scheduled. I needed to put time on my manager’s calendar in order to walk through the customer pain points I identified. And further, my time with my manager needed to be productive and all digital. Storytelling (and a good presentation deck) was essential in being able to communicate efficiently.
It wasn’t until my final presentation of the summer that I realized just how effective my methods of storytelling were in rallying the team around my project. Don’t get it twisted though, I’m still learning. I’d love to hear what others tips and tricks are for improving storytelling and for creating an engaging and memorable presentation.
