Public procurement will play an important role in reviving the economy and communities in the aftermath of Covid-19. This is already increasing the importance of social value in the way that contracts are tendered and bids are scored. The best advice is to embrace this trend rather than see it as an added complication or hurdle.

Twelve or so months ago Covid-19 was an unclassified illness that had broken out in a part of China. None of us could have forecast the devastating impact it would have - and is still having - on lives and businesses around the globe. But the human spirit is resilient - economies and communities will be remade.

Outside of the world of materials and services procured specifically to combat the virus (which is territory I have no intention of venturing into) the Government seems determined that future contracts procured with public funds should help the process of recovery. Social value is very much on the agenda, with an emphasis on how projects can deliver additional outcomes that will help communities and people affected by Covid-19.

Build on the Positive Experiences
While the pandemic brought out the worst in a few people, it also brought out the best in many. It has caused countless people to reappraise their relationships with their neighbours and the places where they live.  There’s a tremendous opportunity to build on this community spirit and redouble our efforts to help each other get through difficult times. 

Many businesses are part of this and, despite the economic challenges, are doing what they can to help local charities and community organisations. It won’t be their primary motivation, but proving their sincere commitment to delivering social value will hardly be a difficult task when it comes to the next tender.

The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 already places a requirement on relevant contract authorities to consider social value. The recent Social Value in Government Procurement consultation white paper seeks to go further, requiring central government to formally take account of social impact as part of the contract award criteria. There is an explicit link being made between government funded projects and helping the post-Covid recovery.

How to Respond
Will simply fulfilling the minimum criteria now be sufficient? Or should firms pro-actively seek out ways of going above and beyond? 

The actions I’d be taking right now are these:

• Audit and document current social value activities and commitments. If nothing else, this will make it easier when you’re asked the question in the next RFQ.
• Evaluate activities against the current situation and priorities. Are you fully addressing Covid-19 related issues and communities?
• Draw up a social value plan or charter and communicate it inside and outside of your business to make a visible commitment.

I don’t think we’ve yet seen the full extent of how social value will be added to the award criteria. Increasingly, firms will find it desirable and necessary to be both creative and expansive in how they demonstrate and measure the social value they add to projects.

​The options are almost endless: from genuine equal opportunities for employment and training, greater use of very local supply chains, involvement in community schemes and so on. What you won’t be able to do is pay lip service or ignore it.

Hopefully, one of the positive effects of remote working is that meetings have been pared back to what’s strictly necessary. This has probably helped everyone’s productivity. But there are still plenty of meetings going on (judging by the number of Zoom fatigue posts and articles doing the rounds).
 
And we shouldn’t forget that meetings sometimes have a value beyond their immediate purpose in helping to build team cohesion and identity. This often comes out of the small talk and casual asides, both of which can become casualties in the world of online meetings. 
 
It’s also harder to make spontaneous interjections when it involves unmuting or catching the eye of the chair from your tiny corner of their screen. Meetings risk becoming a more passive experience for many participants.
 
So here are a few tips that might help everyone feel more engaged, and make meetings more productive and maybe even enjoyable.
 
Try to Shake Things Up
The normal approach is to have a conventional structure: here’s the agenda, here’s who’s taking the lead on each item, chip in if you have any comments. Is that the best way to get everyone’s input in an online meeting? 
 
Why not be creative and look for opportunities to get people to speak or participate in some other way? Maybe circulate questions in advance and ask for verbal feedback on these during the session. This could stimulate debate and interaction and get more ideas and different perspectives out on the virtual table. Participants will be more actively engaged with the subject matter.
 
Keep tabs on the time though. This type of exercise can easily run away with you if you’re not careful. When I use this approach I explicitly set a time range for the discussion. Don’t be afraid to let it run on for a couple of minutes though (if the content is very good), or cut it short if things look to be drying up. Better to end on a high and cut it short before it loses its momentum. 
 
Try to summarize what was said and by who. People will definitely stay engaged if you set yourself a challenge to accurately summarise their input.  It also recognises their input – and who doesn’t enjoy that!
 
Get Slides Off the Screen Quickly
It’s likely that you’ll have to do a bit of screen sharing to show slides and visuals. Leaving these on the screen when they’re not needed can cause engagement levels to drop off. Get them off ‘shared screen’ as early as possible and let people see one another again. You can always flash the visuals back up again if somebody wants to pick up on a particular detail.
 
It’s important to guard against people disengaging and getting distracted by doing another task (like checking email or social media) when they think they’re out of sight or if that part of the meeting doesn’t interest them.
 
More positively, having faces rather than slides on the screen helps improve engagement with one another.  That is especially important in these times of so much social isolation and home working.
 
If slides or other visuals must be shown for a significant portion of the time then try to make them more engaging. One of the easiest ways is to ‘build’ them so that when your key message changes so do the slides. Of course this is good practice in any situation, and is particularly important when working remotely.
 
Actively Engage
Another great way to keep people engaged is to ask them to pose questions to one another about themselves or the topic being presented (whichever is most relevant). You could even set up a couple of quizzes or polls. 
 
Explicitly ask people for their thoughts, rather than waiting for them to offer opinions. You should only do this if you know they will feel safe to be explicitly asked. By exploring thoughts and opinions everyone learns something. This could potentially help identify where to focus your next session or the remaining time within the existing one.
 
My final tip: keep it short. In my experience 30-45 mins is the optimum length. Any longer and you should think about a break so that people can rejoin the conversation feeling refreshed.

Did you read the title of this article and tune in hoping for a magic bullet that would transform every presentation and client meeting into a sure-fire winner? Sadly, life is never quite that simple. The only advice I can offer to make sure you never fail is to never set objectives for the outcome in the first place.

Fortunately (or not), this is the approach that many businesses seem to adopt - even if not by design. They don’t set objectives for what they want to get out of a client meeting so, by definition, they cannot fail. But, even if risk of failure can’t be eliminated, there are steps you can take to make it much less likely.

Most businesses find it easier to accept the need to set objectives for what they want their clients to get from meetings and presentations. Most tell me this is blindingly obvious – ‘we are just presenting a business update,’ or ‘we want to secure the contract.’ Too often they are content to leave their measurement of success at these bland and non-measurable levels.

Accurately measuring whether a session was successful from the presenter’s perspective needs far more detailed consideration. The presenter will (or should) have put a lot of effort and preparation into the session. Probably there are considerable rewards on offer to them personally or their business. Defining what success would look like calls for a detailed plan of objectives that match the importance of the event.

What Might Your Priorities Be?
When it comes to priorities and objectives, it’s impossible to generalise. They will be specific to the client, contract and the depth of your existing relationship. The sorts of things you could target are these:

• Clarification of a specific customer need or priority.
• Gaining acceptance that you have the capabilities to deliver what they need.
• Confirmation of the decision-making process and identification of key individuals (these people might not be part of the meeting).
• Influencing the agenda and criteria for decision-making to suit your strengths.
• Highlighting project risks that the client may not anticipate and showing how you would manage or reduce them.
• Convincing your client that you fully understand their needs and priorities.
• Getting explicit agreement that the client shares your vision for project execution and the key success criteria.
• Ensuring that your client understands the depth of experience and expertise you will deploy to deliver the project.
• Introducing additional benefits and opportunities that the client hasn’t anticipated to get them excited about your solution.

Itemise what you need to achieve from the session and you can then add appropriate trigger statements or questions to the presentation or discussion. 

Structure Your Desired Outcomes
Instead of coming out of a client meeting and convincing yourself that it ‘went OK,’ try to add a bit more structure to your evaluation. The way I do this is to explicitly write down what I need to achieve – probably no more than 5-8 things – sometimes fewer!

I then rank these. I set myself a base of what I absolutely ‘need’ to achieve and I expect to be successful in realizing these at least 80-90% of the time. This sets the lowest level of success I would be satisfied with. It could be whether I communicated my key messages to the audience and confirmed this based on feedback (both verbal and non-verbal) during the session.

Assuming I achieve the base level of “Must” the next level up is my “Intend” level. These objectives should be achievable anywhere between 50-30% of the time; they are becoming much more of a stretch.

Finally, I have my “Like” level. These are the things that I only succeed in getting 5-10% of the time. When absolutely everything goes to plan and the audience or client I’m with is 100% attuned to what I’m saying. You could look at this as being the ‘magic wand, all the stars aligned level.’ But it still helps to shoot for the stars.

Hopefully, this type of structure will help you plan to get more value from meetings and presentations, and have a clearer idea of whether you’ve actually made progress.
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And don’t forget, the same applies to internal meetings where your goal might simply be to elevate your profile and standing with colleagues and stakeholders. Understand the outcome you want and plan how you will make it happen.