We’re still celebrating and spotlighting some of our best sessions from our Digital Summit at Home events from 2020, with a few favorites still in the hopper to share with you from last year. Enjoy this recap and session video from Venngage Chief Growth Officer, Nadya Khoja, from DS at home October.
Nadya will be giving a fresh new talk at our upcoming Digital Summit GO! event on Jan 27. Grab your free ticket to that today!
At Digital Summit at Home in October 2020, Nadya Khoja, Chief Growth Officer at Venngage, shared her best tips for reducing remote work fatigue by pulling from her own experiences with her team.
One tool at every leader’s disposal is the ability to communicate effectively. But knowing how to effectively communicate across distributed teams with complex ideas is challenging. Add in that working remotely will inevitably come with distraction and remote fatigue and leaders are facing an uphill battle. That’s where Nadya steps in and explains that the visual revolution is the communication revolution.
Why Being Visual Matters (06:14)
We’re constantly being overwhelmed by communication and information. While email, Slack, Google sheets, powerpoints were all intended to organize information and communication, they also provide more distractions.
Visual communication can help us understand contextual information while helping us highlight and retain crucial details. Humans naturally take verbal or written information and conceptualize it visually within their minds. As managers and leaders, we should cut out a step by visually providing information first.
Principles of Effective Leadership Communication (10:57)
There are three principles of effective leadership communication:
- Be clear
- Be concise
- Be inspirational
As leaders, we’re often faced with communicating strategy, plans, results. Yet these are complex, nuanced, and boring, so how can we expect to be clear, concise, and inspirational?
By using visuals, getting to that “a-ha!” moment is not only easier but faster.
Visually Transform Your Information (13:29)
Nadya breaks down different categories of communication and information and provides her top recommendations for the best visual framework.
When it comes down to communication centered on strategy (14:33) , there are a lot of ways to reinforce the functions of your strategic approach. Tables, icons, pyramids, comparison charts, mind maps, images, and lists are just a few ways in which you can clearly communicate strategic messages.
When trying to communicate decisions or make decisions (15:26), using visuals helps understand, without any context, where to focus our consideration. Comparison charts, tables, and matrices make it easy to draw the eyes to the most important details.
When trying to communicate around planning (19:39), leveraging roadmaps, timelines, flow charts, and organization charts make it easy to understand changes, plan steps, and how to visually perceive growth.
Visually transforming your information will revolutionize not only the way you as a leader communicates information, but also how that information is processed and engaged with.
How to Provide Clarity with Design (26:28)
Nadya ends the session by sharing some design hacks to help clarify what you’re communicating.
- Use color and size to highlight: Use color and size to draw attention to the most important data points or information you want to communicate.
- Label and annotate your insights: Use annotations to draw attention to important notes, relevant metrics, or specific details.
At the end of the day, visual communication won’t solve all of our work-from-home troubles and woes. But with more fun and engaging visual content, you can keep your team aligned, motivated, and focused more easily.
To hear from experts like Nadya and hundreds of others that teach at Digital Summit, check out our 2021 calendar of virtual and in-person events.
If you can’t wait until February for more Digital Summit in your life, join us on January 27 for Digital Summit Go!, a FREE 1-day online event featuring 12 of our best speakers (including Nadya!). Hear 12 rapid fire talks on Content, Social, Email, and SEO with tons of actionable takeaways to help your marketing soar in the new year. Did we mention that it’s FREE? 🙂