With more and more of us working from home, it’s highly likely that you’ve participated in a video conference or two.

But what about when it’s our turn to take the lead at presenting? Presenting can be nerve wracking at the best of times, but somehow having to deliver an excellent presentation to colleagues and potential business partners can seem all the more daunting when you have to do it in your own private space. Not to mention the fact that several months into working solely from home, they can seem somewhat challenging to engage in now.

Here are some helpful hints and tricks to enhance your presentations to keep people engaged. 

1. Prepare your setting 

In the same way you dress yourself, you should consider how you dress your environment and your background. That means carefully making sure that there’s no piles of laundry or an unmade bed does not give the impression you wish to give your audience. 

Make sure to play it safe with a neutral background avoiding busyness or distractions. 

Check the background once you’re seated, too. The last thing you want is a lampshade halo or a plant growing out of your head. 

If a neutral setting is unobtainable in your setting, you can use the pre-installed background settings on your video conferencing software. 

1. Check your sound quality 

There’s nothing more distracting and disruptive than bad sound quality when you’re delivering a presentation to people. 

Most technology comes with an in-vuilt camera and microphone, but using external mics and headsets enhances the sound quality significantly. They also play a part in eliminating background noise. 

It’s incredibly important that attendees don’t get distracted (or distract) by the sounds of washing machines, dishwashers, animals, kids, phones etc. Make sure to mute any phones, time your washing cycles and put kids and pets in a different room if possible. 

As a meeting host, you have the power to mute all of your attendees to limit the potential of distractions. 

1. Make it a little bit different 

Several months into working from home, the novelty of working from our homes is wearing thin–as are long meetings of talking and planning with the same people with the same background, with the occasional screen share of a chart that doesn’t 100% make sense to us as we lose focus.

Thankfully, companies such as Sentio Space exist and one of their services is to create instructional videos that can easily be shared in and after a presentation. Alternatively add something fun such as trivia to the end of your meeting to help maintain focus. This will be a welcome touch and will surely make your presentations much more interesting and memorable. 

1. Don’t go on for longer than you need to 

Working from home has become tedious and tiring as the pandemic continues, so teams may find themselves less able to maintain focus and attention.
You may be able to say what you need to say in 25 minutes instead of the designated 40. In that case, invite people to stay and talk if they wish, but for those who don’t, let them leave when the important parts have been covered.