Oral Communication

Individual Industrial/Organizational Psychology Presentation

This reflection will be based on oral communication that I successfully executed in my Industrial/Organizational Psychology class. The background for the class is that it is about the inter-workings of a workplace and ways to sustain a healthy work environment. The oral communication part took place with an assignment at the end of the semester, which was to give a presentation that was directed to a corporation in order to help the corporation create a healthy environment for its employees. I decided to focus on women in the workplace in order to share ideas on the ways that would aid in making the work environment a more positive one for women. The thesis of my presentation was that there were necessary procedures that were needed in order to ensure success for women in the workforce. In this essay, I will describe how I successfully created a good quality message.

The central concept and purpose of the message for the speech was to portray women in the workplace and ways to make the workplace healthy for them. The concept for the speech was grasping the idea of women being in the workplace. For my presentation, I used a slideshow which displayed a graph of the women in the workforce that are CEOs. The purpose of this was for the audience to see the amount of women in the workplace. I did this so the audience could grasp the idea of women being in powerful positions in order to move toward the ideas that will help make the work environment for women more positive.

The audience for this presentation was, hypothetically, a corporation that I was working for as an Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychologist. Because my audience was the corporation, the structure of my presentation was specific. I felt as though I could not overload my slides with a lot of information because it would distract them from listening to the ideas that I had. Since the audience was filled with students from my class, it was feasible to create a message that they, as students, would understand as well as fit into the language that is appropriate within the corporate world. On the other hand, the audience was made of college students. Hence, the images I used in my slideshow presentation were there to appeal to a younger audience than those that would be in the older age bracket, which is typical for corporate organizations. For example, I used a meme on one of the slides in the powerpoint. Memes are a new trend highly used by the younger generation. Consequently, I used that image since it would be easily identified by the audience.

There are areas that show how I have executed the message strategy for my presentation. Now, I will elaborate on two specific examples of where I execute the message strategy. The message of my oral presentation was to show how women in the workplace would benefit from a healthy work environment specifically to them. As stated before, the purpose of my presentation was to show women in the workplace and how to keep the number increasing which was to give ideas about creating healthy workplaces. For example, I chose to include a graph during my slideshow which gave the figures for how many women have become CEOs which displayed the numbers increasing. This was then followed by the ways in which an I/O psychologist can come in and help make working environments more secure and positive. Moreover, the slideshow proceeded with another graph showing how the number of unemployed women has decreased. This figure was used in order to further the message of having a healthy environment for women in the workforce.

Furthermore, this was a skillfully created professional message using proper professional terminology due to the length, delivery, and language of the speech. The speech had to be at least seven minutes and had to be delivered without an outline or notecards. This prompted me to deliver the speech as formal as possible and as if I was giving it to an actual board for a corporation that hired me. I made sure to dress in professional attire and gave my speech with direct eye contact with my audience. This made me look credible for the information I was presenting. Also, my speech was delivered formally because I didn’t use notecards and was able to deliver the speech in a timely fashion with still provided the information I prepared. I did these things in order to adapt to the audience, which made this a skillfully created professional message. This adaptation made my message more professional since the length and delivery was tailored to an audience of a corporate nature. Finally, the terminologies that I used were terms from the course, which I also adapted to my audience.