With technology continually on the rise, the workplace is fast becoming a hive for the latest gizmos and gadgets. Long gone are the days of fax machines and dial-up internet – nowadays, it’s all about having super-fast fibre broadband and a streamlined phone system.

In today’s day and age, companies need the latest technology in order to keep up to date and stay relevant. Whether it be one-touch scanning from your smartphone, or the latest in computer operating systems, many companies are now always on the lookout for new technologies to improve their workplace environment.

One such technology comes in the form of an audience response systems (ARS). These systems are not only fantastic at gathering large quantities of data quickly and easily, but they also enable offices to monitor their staff’s feedback. How, you ask? We take you through it.

Anonymous Voting

It can be difficult in meetings to hear everyone’s voice and opinions on certain matters. Normally one or two people are much louder than others, leaving quieter members of staff who are less comfortable speaking out, with less of a say. ARS systems prevent this, giving each member of staff the opportunity to vote on issues anonymously. Plus, since the results show up on screen immediately, nobody can dispute the way in which people have chosen to vote.

Staff Training

ARS systems are a great way of tracking progress during any staff training days. For instance, after each training module, you can use the system to ask a series of questions that test what they have learnt. This can be especially useful when training staff about health and safety procedures, for example, as you can ask specific ‘what would you do if…’ or ‘how would you respond to…’ scenario-based questions to test their learning.

Risk Assessment

Every office requires a risk assessment, so who is going to understand where the potential risks are in the workplace than the staff who actually work there? Using Audience Response Systems enables staff to contribute their ideas quickly and easily, automatically collating answers in an infographic format. This, in turn, enables the dedicated health and safety team to identify how staff voted, allowing them to make any relevant changes.

Staff Quizzes

Audience Response Systems aren’t just great for the day-to-day office tasks – they can be used for fun reasons too. For many years, gameshows like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire have used ARS systems to gather audience feedback. Why not do the same in the workplace? The office Christmas party needs a quiz after all, so what better way to inject a bit of fun into it. You can either show staff responses individually or as a whole, if you’re after more of a team game.

If you are looking to incorporate an ARS system in your office or workplace, you’ve come to the right place. Here at CLiKAPAD, our audience response systems have helped a number of businesses function more efficiently, gathering large sets of data both quickly and easily. Get in touch with us today for further information.

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Make training fun

It can be true that some employee training sessions revolve around topics that aren’t necessarily especially interesting. Take the example of health and safety briefings. While these are absolutely essential for any business, they can often come across as dull or unnecessary.

You can counteract this by making the sessions as fun as possible. A training session on the driest of topics can be lifted by injecting humour and allowing employees to relax as they learn. One of the best ways you can do this is by using charismatic and engaging trainers. The right presenter who can have fun will really improve the amount that staff members can get from a session.

Another popular way to keep staff interested is through gamification. Gamification works by introducing aspects of games to motivate people to achieve certain goals. For example, when running a sales training event you can set up a league table for sales. This could then lead to prizes being awarded for the best performance.

Make use of audience response systems

An audience response system (ARS) allows you to receive immediate feedback from individual handheld devices. This has a huge variety of uses in training sessions as it allows you to engage individuals through the technology.

One use is in testing and quizzes to ensure that everyone in the session is paying attention and understand the material they are being introduced to. Instead of having paper tests that then have to be assessed and marked, ARSs allow for instantaneous assessment. Which can then be displayed anonymously.

Live Q&A sessions help to keep employees interested in the subject matter instead of expecting employees to sit and listen for the duration of the training.

Encourage interactivity

It’s not actually particularly useful for employees to listen to a lengthy lecture filled with stats. In fact, if you are trying to get a message across it’s a much better idea to break up the training sessions with opportunities for interactivity. This can come both through Q&A with the tutor and time for peer-to-peer discussions.

People often learn best by talking things through with their colleagues. It gives them the chance to share their own stories and experiences which can often be far more effective than examples given by trainers. You might find that some members of staff are performing a task in a different way to others. When alternative methods are shared it can ultimately lead to an improved way of working.

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Are you worried that your presentation is lacking? Whether you are giving a speech at a conference or running a workshop, it’s important that your presentation is as interesting as possible in order to keep the attention of your audience and impart your message. Here are seven great ways that you can spice up your presentation.

1. Ask your audience questions – an audience’s attention span can only last so long, so it is important to break up a talk so that it’s not just you speaking the whole time. One of the best ways to do this is to ask your audience questions. You can use an audience response system to poll, quiz or gauge opinions.
2. Use your personality – there are sadly so many occasions that a confident and charismatic person believes that they need to give a presentation in the same style that they have seen before. This can lead to a very stilted and uninteresting experience for your audience. So, don’t be afraid to be yourself and utilise your personality. There’s no ‘right way’ to present, to use your natural mannerisms and speech patterns rather than trying to be too formal or rehearsed.
3. Be passionate – there is nothing worse than a presenter who looks and sounds like they have no interest in being there. Of course, some topics lend themselves more easily to fun presentations, but no matter what you are talking about, you can have a real interest in the things that you are saying. Enthusiasm is infectious.
4. Practice, practice, practice! – reading directly from a script for the whole of your talk is a sure-fire way to bore your audience and completely turn them off from what you are saying. It is important that you know what you are going to say, and don’t rely entirely on a document to read from the whole way. Anyone can read a document, but a greater presenter learns what they are talking about, and isn’t afraid to talk openly.
5. It’s OK to be funny – you don’t need to be scared of humour; if you feel comfortable to tell jokes on stage it can be a great way to relax the crowd and boost interest levels. Audiences respond well to wit and light comedy, as it can even help to make your presentation more memorable. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should randomly intersect your talk with gags from a joke book – let the humour flow naturally.
6. Don’t rely on a slideshow with too much text – many presenters make the mistake of creating a slideshow that contains the whole script. The fact is that no-one listening to your presentation will be able to read the whole of the text and listen to you at the same time. It’s much better to have slides that contain only the most compelling points, as well as images.
7. Bring props – it might seem strange, but there’s a reason that show-and-tell is so popular. Audiences respond well to physical objects – they create a level of intrigue and gives them something else to focus on.

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The festive season is finally here and we’d like to thank all of the customers we’ve worked with over the last twelve months. From everyone here at CLiKAPAD, we hope each of you have a very merry Christmas and wish you a successful and happy New Year.

We’ve had a busy twelve months and it’s been an absolute pleasure working on new projects as well as meeting with familiar faces. Our team has had lots of opportunities to develop our software and come up with imaginative ways in which the CLiKAPAD Audience Response System can be used. We’ll be expanding this even further in 2019, sharing our years of expertise to meet new demands in interesting environments.

Remember, if you have any questions about how our system works you can have a look at our FAQs or – better still – simply pick up the phone to have a chat. Even if you’re in the early stages of planning for next year, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

Otherwise, we wish you all the best over the festive period and hope to see you soon.

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Hosting a festive office party is a great way to wind down the year and let your employees and colleagues relax a little. There’s no harm in a little friendly competition, too – which is exactly where an ARS comes in. Organising a quiz is so much easier (with all kinds of creative possibilities) when you can equip contestants and teams with fast-response handsets.

Need some tips? Here’s our quick guide.

1. Give each player their own clicker keypad or hand one out to each team.
2. Use a PowerPoint presentation to display questions.
3. Incorporate various types of question, such as “fastest finger first” and multiple choice.
4. Responses are submitted using the wireless handsets
5. Once all answers are in, the results can be displayed in the presentation to show how everyone has voted.
6. You reveal the answer and teams can have a good-natured laugh at how well (or badly) each other have done.

An ARS keeps things flowing as the quick reveal of answers eliminates the need for manual scoring. It also makes it easier to conduct tie-breakers and dead-heat rounds, as the responses are accurately timed. Incorporate bonus points for consecutive correct answers or a joke prize for the team that’s consistently slowest to answer.

If you’re interested in making a CLiKAPAD Audience Response System a feature of your upcoming office party, get in touch. We’d be delighted to hear from you.

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1 – Stop scheduling unnecessary meetings

Yes, face-to-face communication is important but if there’s something you can clear up over an email chain or phone call, then do it. Otherwise you’re interrupting everyone’s workflow and dragging them away from their desks unnecessarily.

2 – Do not let meetings overrun

Everyone is busy. Everyone’s time is valuable. Saying that a meeting will take an hour but letting it drag on by another 30 minutes has a knock-on effect of every single person’s day. Even if you don’t cover everything that was supposed to be, make time for that separately. Respect your colleagues’ time and they’ll respect your meetings.

3 – Avoid devolving into sub-meetings

If the structure of your meeting usually involves small groups reporting on projects that are mostly unrelated to each other, you don’t need to have everyone in the same room at once. Instead, schedule meetings beforehand (or don’t – see tip 1) to get the important details and then share only the relevant info with the larger group.

4 – Send around an agenda

Get into the habit of having a fixed plan for every meeting and sticking to it. Send the plan round to everyone at least 2 days beforehand so that they can add comments or prepare required info ahead of time to save dawdling and rambling in the meeting. This also allows people to see if their presence is actually required and whether they can contribute anything meaningful. If a new issue comes up during the meeting, agree to discuss it with the relevant parties afterwards.

5 – Use electronic voting

If you’re dealing with company change, risk assessment or any kind of town-hall vote, using an Audience Response System (ARS) is the fastest way to collate accurate feedback from everybody. Give handsets to individuals (these can be assigned to a person or anonymised) and you can have hundreds of responses gathered quickly. No noise, no fuss and the answers are recorded in easy to read charts and tables to get the data you need.

6 – Try standing up

If you don’t anticipate the meeting taking very long, don’t sit down. By staying on your feet, everyone is more inclined to keep the discussion on track and make a decision so that they can go back to their chair. Simple, but effective.

For more information about incorporating a time-saving ARS into your business practices, contact us to see how CLiKAPAD can help.

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There’s no doubt that audience feedback is an incredibly important insight, but it’s 2018 – there are better ways to collect it. If you’re working with a live audience, electronic data collection is the way forward.

Why is an Audience Response System (ARS) better?

Firstly, the palm-sized voting keypads are intuitive to use and far less cumbersome than paper surveys, and responses just require the quick push of a button. Even the novelty of being handed a credit card-sized keypad is enough to capture the audience’s attention at many events.

Secondly, an ARS is interactive. Rather than giving your audience a mute document for them to fill out in isolation, an ARS invites discussion with your participants as you go through questions and they submit their answers. It feels integrated into your presentation or workshop, rather than simply tacked-on at the end.

You can also show your survey results live, as soon as everyone has submitted their response. This provides its own discussion point, unique to each audience. If you start asking for feedback early in your presentation (rather than leaving it to the end), you can even use these responses to inform the next step of your presentation, covering any knowledge gaps or simply building on the answers you’ve received. This makes what you’re saying more engaging and relevant to your audience – something that would be incredibly time-consuming to do with paper forms (and virtually impossible with larger audiences).

Finally, there’s the data collection element. You don’t have to worry about missing a response or deciphering confusing written answers, and nor will you need to go through each response manually – far from it. The CLiKAPAD system automatically collates responses into a database (which can be combined and segmented by demographics data if you have it), in a format that is accessible to anyone in your organisation that needs it.

Interested in trying an ARS?

This has been a very quick overview of how an ARS is faster, more engaging and more efficient than outdated paper surveys at getting meaningful customer feedback. At CLiKAPAD, we’ve worked with such a wide variety of clients that we only need to hear a little bit about your requirements to understand how, specifically, an ARS could benefit your workshop, industry event or product demonstration.

If you’re interested in bringing your customer feedback processes into the future, contact us today. With purchase and hire options as well as the expert guidance of our in-house teams, implementing a modern ARS system is easier than you might think.

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If training is targeted and delivered well it can boost company loyalty and improve staff retention, as well as improving performance and boosting motivation. Training can also be used to ensure that staff understand the company’s values and mission statement.

Crucially, training can be used to fill in skill gaps, particularly in areas that are constantly changing, like technology and marketing. It can also be useful when negotiating changes in the business, for example, when introducing new processes or systems.

Every employee should have a professional development plan to help them focus on their careers, identify gaps in their knowledge and skills and to find the most relevant training courses.

Corporate training has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few years, mainly because of technology. Many of the best corporate training programs deliver training in several different ways: blended learning (mixing online with face-to-face learning); collaborative platforms; webinars and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), accessible short courses delivered to large numbers of learners online.

We’ve identified three ways to deliver great corporate training:

1 – Getting interactive

People learn better and quicker when they interact with one another. Audience Response Systems (ARS) from Clikapad can help here. An ARS is a handheld keypad, about the size of a credit card, that allows individuals to respond anonymously and quickly with the press of a button. You can press buttons between 0 to 10 and answer multiple choice questions, take part in quizzes or vote.

You can use the system to find out which subject areas your audience is most interested in or confused by, to check levels of understanding before and after training and to pitch training at the right level. Results can be shown instantly and embedded on a graph or chart in PowerPoint. The data can be collected on an Excel spreadsheet and analysed later in the office.

2 – Using the power of social media

Social media has become an integral part of most people’s lives and it can be used to augment both online and face-to-face training sessions.

You can start a discussion on LinkedIn, share tips, views, problems and possible solutions. Trainers can set up an open or closed Facebook group where students can discuss issues, ask course-related questions or share relevant information. Twitter can also connect course students or people who attended a particular event, using a hashtag (#) to categories tweets and make them easier to find, such as #SussexSEOConvention.

3 – Mixing up methods and changing pace

It can be hard on an audience if they are listening to a monologue from a trainer all day. Mix up your methods and techniques and don’t just make the session an information dump. A trusty PowerPoint presentation used right can be effective, as can strategic tea and coffee breaks. Using audience response systems on training days are another effective way to get people enthusiastic and involved.

Break out into smaller groups for discussion, practical learning and idea sharing. You could set your groups a real-life problem the company faces and ask them to work on it together. Mixing up workplace teams is a good idea to build understanding between teams and to share knowledge.

Think about the best way to deliver your training: online or offline or a mix of both. The popularity of mobile learning, using smartphones, is growing and works best when lessons are divided up into blocks of under 10 minutes long, tailored to short attention spans on phones. You could also put up a training video on YouTube or Facebook.

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Workplaces are changing faster than ever before, thanks to the influx of a new generation of employees – millennials. These young adults have a bad reputation for being glued to their smartphones and having an inflated sense of self-importance, however, with proper direction this translates into an incredibly capable workforce that is utterly fluent in technology, motivated to push past conventional obstacles and keen to prove their value within an organisation.

Here are a few pointers about how to harness the dynamic energy of a millennial workforce to create a brighter future for your firm.

Creating Value through Inclusion

The days of “what can you do for this company?” are long gone, and the millennial mindset is much more focused on “what can this company do for me?” Traditional perks like staff discounts, pension plans and a competitive salary simply don’t add enough value in a market where free gourmet lunches, flexible working and company socials are available at other firms.

A big bonus for millennial employees is the sense of inclusion – the impression that they are able to actively contribute to the direction of the company they are working for. Rather than following the outdated formula of management prescribing strategy from the top, it’s time to reverse this and give employees the opportunity to develop their own action plan.

Sharing the Company Vision

To do this, your teams are going to have to fully understand your company vision and objectives. This needs to be done in an interactive way, supported by an open discussion about goals, culture and targets. Holding all-hands meetings for employees to attend makes this possible, where everybody is given an equal opportunity (and responsibility) to interact with leadership and contribute in key decision-making.

While this might initially seem like a step back in terms of efficient planning, it’s a leap forward for building a healthy workplace culture that attracts – and retains – top tier talent. Town hall meetings are a space for sharing critical information and building an environment of trust, expression and collaboration. When individuals are united by a shared purpose, it makes for a strong, productive company.

Using Technology as an Enabler

Research has shown that the anonymity provided by submitting questions and responses via a digital tool, such as an Audience Response System, greatly improves the quality (and honesty) of the interaction. Where previous generations might have been more comfortable openly voicing opinions than using technology to get their point across, the millennial workforce does not have the same barriers.

Crowdsourcing ideas, feedback and queries puts less focus on the individual and more emphasis on the issue at hand, creating a more open dialogue between management and teams as a whole. It takes the politics and personal relationships out of problem-solving, empowers even the quietest employees to have their voice heard and allows potentially controversial issues to be brought up without fear of repercussion.

For more details about how CLiKAPAD technology can help your company work, train and learn collaboratively, get in touch. We have many years’ experience in setting up creative interactive solutions and would be happy to discuss your requirements.

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Planning a large-scale conference or event is no small task. It requires organisers to take on a lot of responsibility while simultaneously relying on others. They need to be able to pay attention to the tiniest detail as they also maintain a clear view of the bigger picture.

Given the complexity of organising such an event, it’s no wonder that certain parts of a conference can go overlooked. However, in most cases, the same aspects get missed with each event, leading to a repetitive, uninspiring experience for your attendees. Here are the first three you should look out for.

Mistake 1: Failing to make it a discussion

There was a time where conference attendees expected to show up, sit down and be talked at for a few hours, but this is simply no longer the case. Your guests are going to want to take part in the conversation for themselves by asking and answering questions, and sharing insights and opinions with their peers.

Simply adding a five-minute Q&A session at the end of a presentation won’t be enough. It’s time to re-think the standard format altogether, and introduce AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) sessions, or panel debates instead. You should also encourage the use of interactive elements to keep the audience engaged, like polls, quizzes or tests carried out with an Audience Response System.

Mistake 2: Long sessions with short breaks

There’s a limit to the human attention span, and even the most interesting speaker will lose audience interest if they chatter on for more than an hour. After two or three extended sessions you can expect attention to have completely dwindled (especially if you’re not providing equally long breaks), making your last speakers redundant.

Keep engagement at its highest by encouraging speakers to keep their presentations short and peppy – half an hour is a good target. Provide your audience with long and short breaks (make sure to tell them which is when), which will allow them to network, recap and refresh as required.

Mistake 3: Packing in as much as the day will allow.

Signing up a dozen excellent speakers and allocating them back-to-back spots on your agenda might seem like the best way to deliver value to your attendees, but actually, it’s more likely to cause fatigue. Realistically, your audience’s attention is going to wane after two or three sessions.

Balance your day with opportunities for interaction, whether that entails dedicated discussion and breakout surveys after each speaker, or a longer lunch period for delegates to network. Incorporating unallocated sessions will also give everyone chance to check-in with their offices and emails if need be, reducing the need for them to check their phones during presentations.

Do any of these mistakes sound familiar? Look out for our next post where we’ll cover three more common failures in event planning and how you can avoid them.

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