Team Presentations: A Guide to Stitching A Presentation From Multiple Team Members' Work| The Beautiful Blog

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Harvard Business Review reported that employees spend approximately 50% more time engaged in collaborative work than they do otherwise.

Collaboration in the workplace is an important element for the success of any business. It’s thought-provoking and facilitates new ideas, enables teams to complete important projects quicker, and helps them meet outstanding deadlines more efficiently. A study conducted by Queens University of Charlotte revealed that 75% of employers believe collaboration and “teamwork” to be very important in the workplace. And rightfully so. Not only does collaborating with team members allow you to divy up tasks to different stakeholders with the expertise and tools to handle them, it shows employees that they are valued and respected.

By simply delegating tasks and collaborating with colleagues, employees are likely to be more involved and interested in their work. In fact, Harvard Business Review reported that employees spend approximately 50% more time engaged in collaborative work than they do otherwise. Are we surprised? Collaboration can streamline cross-departmental strategies and ideas, be innovative, and influence creativity that might be lacking in more siloed projects.

Collaboration has the same effect on presentations, too. In many cases, multiple team members may be working together on the same deck. While each employee is likely assigned a couple of slides within their wheelhouse, collaborating on a team presentation can help departments structure their stories in new ways. It’s also much more efficient to work as a team when you’re trying to scale the presentation process and create more content.

Sure, we can all agree that collaboration is a crucial part of the presentation process when you’re trying to grow your business— but with collaboration comes responsibility. The more cooks you add to the kitchen, the messier it gets. When collaborating on a deck, you have to consider content management, branding control, and security. Plus, with various peers working in tandem in the same deck, you’re a lot more likely to end up with a hodgepodge of slides. So how do you work together on a team presentation without killing the effectiveness of the final deck?

Here are the top tips for stitching together a presentation from multiple team members’ work.

Give every team member a deck designer

Before you ask your team to create a deck, give them the tools for success. Beautiful.ai is the deck designer so your teammates don’t have to be. It’s easy to drop in content and ideas and watch the smart slides adapt in real time. Yeah, that means no design skills are required.

Our pre-built presentation templates curated by industry experts offer a starting point for every team, and every story. Simply plug and play, and customize each slide to reflect your content. You can start with a template, or start from scratch, but either way our smart slides will help guide you along the way. Let team members choose their slides from our new inspiration gallery and we’ll do the rest as they add in their content.

Collaboration is key

Now that you have a PowerPoint alternative, collaboration is key for team presentations. Beautiful.ai’s advanced collaboration tools let you invite people—inside or outside your team—with one click. Simply choose your collaborator and send them an invite from within the product. And forget versioning issues. Everything’s on the cloud, so everyone’s always working on the same slide or deck. It’s a collaborative dream.

With innovative collaboration features, it’s easier to sync up and get sign-off in real time. Multiple collaborators can be working in the same deck, at the same time, and any edits are automatically updated in the cloud so you know everyone has the most updated version at all times.

Stay in-sync with centralized content

Nothing kills collaboration like having to wait for your colleague to complete their slides before you can get started on your own. And once they’re done, you have to make sure you have their most recent deck files. Things can get lost in the mix, which can make combining multiple team members’ work difficult. An important element of collaboration, and team presentations, is centralized content. With Beautiful.ai you’re able to go from scattered slides to a single, searchable library. Create a slide once, tag it, and teams can use it infinitely at their discretion. This helps when team members are looking for a specific piece of data to include, or want to reference a proposal from last month’s presentation. Now the right slide is right in your presentation maker, and everyone has access.

Having centralized content for team presentations means that everything is up to date, at all times. The moment new data comes in, push it live to multiple decks. With a single click, you can update old reports and save coworkers hours of editing every week.

Create guardrails for consistency

One of the biggest hiccups that comes with taking different slides from various team members’ work is the lack of control and inconsistent branding. You can’t expect everyone to have the same design style which can make it hard to align on content. There’s nothing worse than stitching together slides from various peers and unintentionally creating a frankendeck.

Thankfully, with Beautiful.ai it’s easy to lock in branding. The team lead, or admin, can create custom themes complete with company logos, branded colors and fonts, and pre-approved images, so that collaborators don’t have to guess which design will look best. Shared Themes give teammates guardrails to stay visually consistent from deck to deck. If a slide is created in your pre-designed theme, your branding will automatically be applied to each slide throughout the presentation with no additional work on your end. This eliminates mismatched slides and inconsistent design when colleagues are collaborating together on one presentation.

Provide feedback in real time

Once your team members’ have completed their slides, it’s easy to sync up. Leave feedback in real-time by adding comments, or tags, to specific slides. Each collaborator will be notified both in the product and via email if there is a comment, so they can receive feedback or sign-off on slides in real time. Rather than having to track down approvals, you can communicate right in the product, making it easier to organize revisions and secure final slides.

Once all of your questions or concerns have been addressed, and you have a final version of the deck locked down, you can easily drag the slides to rearrange the order so that your team’s slides flow together to tell your story more seamlessly.