This is a re-occurring problem for many managers out there. The productive time of a manager or an executive is valuable. Many tell their staff to make presentation slides. But, all too often, the slides simply don’t contain what senior management wants to see and thus need to be redone. Redoing PowerPoint slides can be a frustrating and time consuming process. Today, we will discuss a way to fix this problem.
Slides Made By Other Staff Members
If you are an executive or a part of management, then maybe you hand over the task of making PowerPoint slides to one of your juniors. Some of these presentations are regular reports to senior management, and are expected to be fairly simple presentations. Of course, they are supposed to feature key information that senior management is waiting to see. However, what they usually become are confusing and overloaded presentations with too much extra information.
They usually need to be edited by staff before being used.
Why is This a Problem?
The problem is that too much time is being used to make presentations. Time that can be used to help improve things instead of correcting mistakes. Looking at the long term impact of wasted time, you should be able to see how much this costs the company in terms of productivity. If you’re in charge of making these slides for your boss then it might reflect negatively on you when the presentation needs to be revised.
Then, Whats The Solution?
The solution is to teach your staff a few simple things to make the whole presentation making process as free of errors as possible.
You should decide on a template for each type of presentation you usually need. You might need to make a monthly sales template, or a business report template. Use sample templates or make your own customized template in PowerPoint. You will need to decide on consistent colors, fonts, formatting, and images (logos etc) that will be used in the templates.
Tell the staff to make the text as clear and concise as possible. Try deciding placeholders for text and visuals. Try to be as consistent as possible. Show examples of how the presentation should look like and come up with a template that comes as close to it as possible.
Image Courtesy:
Inventory and Months to Sell by Farcaster [GNU Free Documentation License] via Wikimedia Commons
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