How Lesly Zapata used Slides With Friends to improve school nurse trainings and her team's morale.
Lesly needed a way to keep her team connected and working well together, as well as to manage the training of school nurses across the state of Massachusetts. With some of her team remote, it was getting hard to keep everyone on the same page. She started using Slides With Friends for team meetings and to help facilitate continuing education for the nurses in their program. She immediately saw a happier team, and improved training ratings from nurse participants.
Lesley Zapata’s job as senior program manager is to keep her people engaged in important work: she manages the continuing education training of school nurses across the state. While running in-person trainings as well as hybrid and remote team meetings, it’s urgent that she keep all her attendees interested — retaining information, engaged with the material, and working well with each other during these gatherings (and beyond).
“I felt like I was ‘forcing’ people to talk, if that makes sense”
During meetings and trainings, she found herself casting around for ways to get people to turn on their cameras and unmute themselves on Zoom. She wanted a better way.
When her team went mostly remote during the Covid pandemic, she began looking for ways to make her now-video-meetings more enjoyable, and ways to continue managing trainings.
It was mission-critical to keep her highly social, collaborative team feeling connected and engaged while on Zoom.
“I was looking for other ways outside of Zoom to make it more fun, more engaging.”
And for her trainings, she needed ways to ensure people were understanding — and retaining — the important material, so that participants
Slides With Friends let Lesly do all of that, in one tool. She implemented interactive presentations across many of her gatherings, remote, hybrid, and in person, and started seeing real positive results.
The results were clear — and overwhelmingly positive.
Lesly’s team not only participated more, they actually looked forward to meetings again.
“People really like it. It’s created a really nice flow where I don’t feel like I am forcing people to talk,” she said.
Importantly, it gave every team member a way to engage — not just the loudest voices.
“We found that more people were contributing, not just the regular talkers. Now our whole team has been engaging.”
At the SHIELD retreats and school nurse trainings, Slides With Friends also helped make dense, technical topics more accessible and fun. Qualitative feedback from learners showed higher satisfaction and engagement — a key outcome for an accredited training program like theirs.
Lesly is now looking forward to expanding her use of Slides With Friends, especially in larger in-person trainings, and she is excited get even better results.
