visual literacy in business

Brianna Williams

Ashford University

June 12,2014

Visual Literacy

The message that I’ll communicate at the work place is the level of monthly stats and the goals for the coming month. I work primarily for medical billing in long term acute care. I am currently the team leader of communication in the company, where by i do hold a fifteen minutes monthly meeting, which involves my team of four co-workers and the company’s manager. The main purpose of the meeting is to go over the company’s monthly stats and the goals for the coming month.

While in this meeting, i will do deliver my message with the help of visuals, mostly use of graphs, which makes it easier. This use of visuals will enable me to easily show the level of the company’s monthly monetary intake. It is therefore easy to determine whether the company is performance is above, below, or exceeds the set goals that are required to be met (Elkins, 2007).

The use of graphs in visuals is more important since graphs enable data to be displayed in the most simplest way, because they do not have way too many numbers that end up confusing people, as compared to any other forms of visuals. The members in the meeting can also easily see how the input and output values relate, thus enabling them to see the difference between any two or more values in the graph, since they do display the level of values in terms of rising and falling, over time. In additions, the use of graphs enables flexibility, by making things appear to be better than they really are. For example, by making a break at the beginning of a graph, and display the company’s monthly or annual income as compared to other companies, whose income are a bit lower, this makes the company appear to be leading, thus attracting investors, among other advantages (Dondis, 1973).

I plan to use power point with slides as my platform in order to show the progress and growth of the company from the past six months, in terms of monetary value. PowerPoint is more advantageous compared to other platforms, as it helps to improve the audience’s focus. It allows for use of images, audios and videos, thus helping me to be more interactive with my audience. It shall also boost collaboration among the team members, since they will collaborate and contribute to the final presentation. It also will enable the sharing of the content. When I upload my presentation on the internet, any member of my targeted audience, who was absent during the presentation, shall be able to view it online at their own convenient time. In addition, it shall enable flexibility since the slides are customised to fit my own needs, thus providing me with a number of ways to communicate with my audience (Wilde, 2010).

Since the team gets stronger as the months go by, I basically need to show the increase in previously denied claims that the company has managed to get them paid. This works as a motivation for the team and company at large to put in more hard work. The company’s manager and my co-workers are my intended audience, and others who make up my team. They can see the visual difference of money that they’ve brought in the company, plus the manager is able to see the team’s growth, thus making it outstanding from other teams in the company. This visual gives every of the worker in the company something to look at, by the graphs being displayed and the monthly goals being met creates a sense of accomplishment among the workers. In turn, the team members can be able to evaluate their hard work, whether it has increased or decreased, as compared to previous months (Wilde, 2010).

In conclusion, the use of visual effects in meetings and delivery of message makes it more easily not only to me as the presenter, but also my targeted audience, since they will find it easy to relate to and understand (Wilde, 2010).

References

Dondis, A.(1973) A Primer of Visual Literacy. MIT Press. Michigan

Elkins, J.(2007) Visual Literacy. Routledge. New Jersey

Wilde, J.(2010) Visual Literacy: A Conceptual Approach to Graphic Problem Solving.

Watson-Guptill Publications Inc. New York.