In any workplace, drumming up motivation among employees can be a challenging task. More specifically, fostering team motivation, engaging your team, building a space of psychological safety, and creating growth opportunities for your employees is something that many leaders and upper-management struggle with. Not to mention learning how to pivot and motivate your team in a virtual world. It’s something that Adweek Executive Mentees— Ashley Buxton, Caroline Giegerich, and Kenna Ranson— felt so strongly about that they formed a committee to help create a deeper understanding of team motivation with the goal of creating an all-encompassing playbook and sharing those findings with the advertising community. 

The three women were passionate about this topic, and Adweek encouraged them to get involved by creating a toolkit to provide expertise and insight on the matter. 

Powering up customer insights

The committee conducted surveys around team motivation and used their five-part Motivation Monday series on Adweek to share their findings with other professionals. 

They had over 250 people respond to their survey, which provided a really rich dataset for them to work with. After dissecting the data, the team kicked it over to Caroline—the visual specialist in the group— so she could dive in and give it a creative spin. 

When Caroline was tasked with throwing their data into slides, she quickly realized that PowerPoint wasn’t the right platform for the project. “I ramped up my own expectations.” Caroline says, ”I first went to PowerPoint, but I can't stand how PowerPoint does graphs and charts. It wasn’t giving me what I wanted to be able to position this work in the way that I felt like it needed to be positioned." And so she did some poking around on the internet and came across Beautiful.ai. The team was blown away by how clean and modern the final result was, and how effortlessly their data came to life.

Killing inefficiencies with Beautiful.ai

The three powerhouses are in three different cities, and have full-time careers beyond this passion project, so efficiency is key. The ability to divide and conquer on the decks has helped them improve the caliber of output compared to what they could do in Excel or PowerPoint. Caroline explained that being able to work in tandem in Beautiful.ai has saved them between 30-40% of design time that it might have taken in any other platform. Kenna adds, “It took me half the time that it would have in PowerPoint. Trying to put together shapes by myself, or finding the icons and getting them right is a huge time suck.” Being able to find royalty-free images right within the product, and not having to hop around to five different places to find something, is another one of their favorite time-saving features.  

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Executive presence

Storytelling is a huge part of their series. In fact, the team has used Beautiful.ai to present to CEOs and C-suite executives, and have received glowing feedback on how strong their story was. Specifically how the slides acted as a great visual aid to help propel the story forward. Ashley says, “It's a good way to bring data to life, but also just the slick storytelling that's able to be used with Beautiful.ai’s animations, graphics, and charts—it packages everything together really nicely.” Some of the limitations that come from the smart slides forces them to pull their story together and tell it in a more efficient way. Caroline explains that so many times people lean on words without thinking about the story, and Beautiful.ai helps them visualize their story in a more engaging way to really drive the message home. 

Ashley adds how data visualization is an important element in their overarching story, “It's not just a line chart, these are actual people, and their opinions. So being able to visualize the people and the data in graphs is really powerful.” 

Leveling up with powerful visuals

Using a brand marketing approach to presentations is something that’s oftentimes overlooked. And without great output, you are in danger of not translating your offering to the best of your ability to your audience. In brand marketing, it’s important to leverage storytelling to make your service or your offering feel more connected to the consumer. Presenting their work with the best, most professional look and feel—like they did with their Beautiful.ai slides— does justice to power up their overall insights and findings. Caroline says, "It’s important to use certain visuals and storytelling to make your service or your offering feel more connected to the consumer."

In fact, Beautiful.ai was the vehicle for selling their whole plan. They needed to ensure they were creating great content to get the coverage their passion project deserved. Ashley adds, “I think this Beautiful.ai presentation effectively grabbed the attention of our audience and actually got them to change their own behaviors and prioritize team motivation once and for all— which is really powerful.”

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You can check out their five-part Motivation Monday series— How Managers Are Missing The Mark, The Top 5 Pitfalls Demotivating Employees, Motivating Teams At Every Career Stage, Leading An Effective 1:1, and Goal Setting— on Adweek.