5 Ways Virtual Guest Speakers Can Benefit Your Organization

Bringing a guest speaker to your next virtual organizational meeting can significantly benefit your team. Having a third party present can introduce unbiased and uncomplicated voices to your business discussions. You can also work with them to provide a fresh perspective on established company culture, organizational goals and missions.

The topics guest speakers are qualified to cover are specific to each presenter and their personal/professional experience. A skilled professional speaker will work with you before presenting to determine what topics you want to be covered and whether they are the best qualified to deliver that information.

Here are 5 ways virtual guest speaks can benefit your organization:

1. Inspiration for your team members

Virtual guest speakers can be excellent sources of inspiration for your team members. They can bring different points of view and new ideas to the table, which will help you stay on top of the latest trends in your industry. Seeing how other business leaders or entrepreneurs change challenges to opportunities can be a source of inspiration.

In addition, guest speakers often have inspirational personal stories. These stories can motivate your team members. Hearing how a successful individual concurred adversity, challenges and hurdles can provide employees with concrete examples of how they might approach their work and life challenges.

2. Path alignment

Discovering path alignment, or career alignment, is one of the many benefits of bringing on a business speaker. Guest speakers can provide a new unbiased perspective on company department competencies, processes and responsibilities and then engage employees on the same topics. Your management team can then better identify if employees are competently involved in their current department.

In addition, it can jumpstart a conversion about which career paths are most engaging and rewarding for employees who are fatigued and on the verge of burnout. The best benefit of this process is that you can help your employees be the best they can be, avoiding attrition, termination and the stigma of underperforming.

3. Developing effective meetings and team building exercises

It’s hard for most of us to think of meetings as fun. If this were not true, then the question “Couldn’t this have been an email?” would be a foreign thought. Guest speakers can help in this department too.

Inviting a guest speaker to a department meeting can provide your team with more than a stale lecture on speaking with confidence. A guest speaker can teach managers strategies to plan effective meeting agendas and timetables. They can also introduce fun and relevant team-building activities suited for virtual team meetings.

Can you imagine having a team meeting filled with laughter, joy and productive discussions? It’s not impossible. Your mood affects engagement and information retention. Sandwiching business-critical information between fun and interactive group activities creates memorable meetings, which translates to long-term gains.

4. Employee engagement via active listening

The best way to improve employee engagement is to incorporate active listening in all company and department interactions. Guest speakers can be better suited to teaching your team about this crucial skill as they are not personally involved with team members. They can teach and coach the lesson to employees without the baggage of being lectured by the boss. The boss can also learn something new in the process.

Active listening can engage and empower employees to share their thoughts and ideas openly. A team that can effectively communicate with mutual empathy and respect can work more harmoniously and productively. This is a skill that must be learned and practiced. That’s why it’s beneficial to have a guest speaker lead the active listening lessons.

Active listing is essential for sales and customer service teams. Teams that can effectively ask open-ended questions can better engage with the customers they serve. By better understanding what customers need, your teams can reduce the omission of critical information.

5. Improve customer relationships

It’s important to remember that customers are not just cash cows and revenue sources. One of the quickest ways to lose a customer is to forget their feelings and make assumptions about their position. So, it’s important to practice empathy with every interaction. 

Inviting a guest speaker to present empathetic communication strategies and tactics can help your sales and customer service teams better engage customers and anticipate problems. Active listening can help your company close more deals and retain more customers.

Final thoughts

The above are just a few reasons you should consider having a virtual guest speaker present to your remote team. They can also help you better understand how customers interact with your business and how this can affect your overall company.