Taking Pictures You Can Be Proud Of

Are you a leader or manager at your workplace? Does your job description entail relaying important, business-related information to your subordinates? If so, here are 3 very good reasons why you should stop sending out memos and start presenting slideshows instead.

Visual Learners Are The Majority

People understand information best when it is presented to them in their own learning style. There are 4 different learning styles (visual, auditory, read-write, and kinesthetic), and more people fall into the visual learning group than any other type. How many people are visual learners? About 65% of the population are. This means that if you're expecting your team to learn material and sending that material out as memos, the majority of your team isn't going to digest the information provided at optimal efficiency.

Slideshows address this problem perfectly. When presenting a slideshow, you can use a combination of words, sounds, and images to target several different learning styles at once.

Attention Spans Are Dwindling

New research shows that the average human's attention span has dwindled down to an 8 second time-span. Before your team members even get past the introductory paragraphs in your memos, their minds have moved onto other things. 

If you want your team members to have any interest in information you're presenting to them, you've got to break it down into smaller chunks to prevent boredom. When you use a slideshow to relay information to your team, every new slide brings a refreshing change that holds your team members' attention a little longer. 

Images Are Easier To Remember

It's not enough for your team to learn the information you present to them -- they have to remember it, too. When a person stores information in their mind, they do so either visually (by remembering images) or verbally (by remembering words). And according to research, your team members are much likelier to remember information that they store as images than they are to remember information that they store as words. 

Of course, your team members are welcome to create their own visual interpretation of your memos to convert to memory, but most of them won't take this step. You have a far better chance of getting your team to retain information if you present it to them in a slideshow with lots of memory-friendly images and infographics.

If you're in charge of a team at work and you must relay information to them that is important to the nature of your business, stop sending memos and start presenting slideshows. You can either create the slides yourself or hire a slideshow service to do it for you.