[IRO Guide] How to ace your half-year results meeting

Providing clarity in your equity story has never been more important to investor relations than it is now. It is easier than ever for investors to collate data from your communications and analyse it using computer algorithms. This is why you can’t afford inconsistencies and vague sentiments. You must make sure that you are proactive in presenting an engaging story that offers solid reasons for the judgements you take and the estimates you make. The perfect place to start telling this story is your half-year results meeting.

A half-year results meeting allows you to engage with your investors and keep them updated on your progress towards your goals. This breeds confidence if you are due to meet or exceed your targets, but also offers a chance to reassure shareholders that you have a strategy in place to head off any unexpected downturns in performance.

A PwC survey found that 90% of investors form an impression of the quality of an organisation’s management from the quality of its reporting. However, only 28% confirmed that they believed management at these organisations were transparent enough about the metrics they used to plan and manage the business. With these two statistics in mind, it is clear that IROs have a lot of work to do with their communications to instil trust and confidence in their current and future shareholders.

Should you webcast your half-year results?

Many major organisations are already discovering the benefits of webcasting their half-year reports.

• Stationery, lighter and shaver giant BIC recently made the decision to webcast its half-year results meetings in order to engage more stakeholders. The company wanted to be transparent with its investors, as well as to communicate its results to all the necessary stakeholders at the same time.Of its target group of stakeholders, spread across Europe and the US, BIC managed to reach 90% simultaneously, a result that would not have been possible with a physical-only meeting.
• In the past Dutch bank Rabobank used to organise a physical press conference, analysts’ presentation and follow-up video calls with board members to announce and clarify their results. By taking the whole event online and allowing journalists and shareholders to ask questions, the company ensured accuracy and increased the reach of its messaging, as well as increasing efficiency and cost savings.

Online half-year results events draw more investors in, allowing those who could not attend in person to find out the information they need as it is announced. Full live video events also create trust and inspire action. It also allows these events to take place in full, even with many parts of the world still experiencing COVID-19 restrictions relating to social distancing.

How to ace your half-year results meeting

Here are some steps you should take to ensure the success of your online half-year results meeting:

1. Understand the requirements

The first step to creating an impactful periodic investor relations webcasting event is to check that you meet the requirements in your local legislation and the laws in any other territories in which you have a presence.

This could dictate the nature of the event, the timings, the number of stakeholders you engage, the follow-up work you need to do and a number of other factors that contribute to the overall results meeting.

2. List the mission-critical tasks

In order to provide the best impression of the business, you must make sure you work through the mission-critical tasks required before the half-year results meeting. This includes:

• Informing the market of the date of the announcement
• Compiling a running order for the event
• Comparing your organisation’s results with the market
• Writing media releases to condense the results into easily digestible snapshots
• Creating the slides for the presentation
• Producing the financial tables for distribution to all stakeholders
• Listing disclosures relating to the results
• Collating analyst forecasts about the financial position of the company for the rest of the financial year and beyond

3. Establish meeting protocol

You should consider how the meeting will be conducted. This means thinking about how to ensure you provide the required clarity while enabling stakeholders to contribute or ask questions during the event. Although this interaction is important, it is also easy for it to dilute the experience and distract from the momentum of the meeting. So, this is where you should aim to strike a balance.

Using the example of Rabobank, the company chose to allow journalists to ask questions throughout the presentation using a one-to-one chat function, with investors making their queries afterwards in an integrated event call.

4. Decide on technology

How you host your half-year or annual results meeting depends on the requirements of your business. You can choose from these options:

Type of meeting	Definition
In-person only	This is a traditional meeting where investors have to travel to the venue to attend. It means that many stakeholders are prevented from taking part, due to the location and, potentially, the timing of the event during the workweek.
In-person meeting that is streamed	This allows those who can’t attend the event to watch it as a live stream on their devices. However, they cannot contribute to the meeting as they would if they were there in person. They are merely passive observers.
Hybrid meeting	A hybrid meeting is one held in a physical location and with in-person attendees, but which also allows remote participation. Online attendees can ask questions through the platform used to stream the meeting. This allows those who cannot make it to the physical meeting due to location or time constraints to fully engage with the issuer.
Online webcast	This is a meeting that is held entirely online. All attendees participate remotely via the webcast. Depending on the platform you use, they may have different options to participate. For example, with Company Webcast, viewers can take a lot of actions including voting and asking questions via chat.

 

5. Mind your bottlenecks

Pre-planning is key for delivering a successful half-year results meeting. In order to have all the pieces in place for the day of the meeting, you need to work backwards and set realistic deadlines for a host of necessary activities that might otherwise cause delays and bottlenecks.

One such issue is gaining approval from the audit committee who must ensure the integrity of the financial metrics you want to announce. It takes time for them to thoroughly assess the reports and your financial reporting judgements. This means you need to supply them with the report in good time to allow them to complete the statutory auditors’ review report, then provide approval and keep the workflow going.

Liaise with your audit committee, your legal team and all other internal stakeholders about creating a realistic timeline to have everything ready for the meeting; then stick to that timeline.

6. Consider the key messages

What are the notable metrics relating to your financial information that need highlighting in your results meeting? This should include the positive results, but also those that have fallen below expectations too. These are the key figures and they are important for transparency and trust.

Pull out those that are significant outliers when compared with the guidance or expectations. Sharing these highlights with your audience makes the information easy to digest and tells your story as clearly as possible.

You need to thoroughly analyse the results in order to provide the most coherent possible narrative of the main topics affecting the organisation, where the organisation is and what the outlook is like in the second half of the year.

7. Prepare for the Q&A session

There will be a Q&A session following the results presentation and your CEO and other presenters need to be fully briefed and informed before fielding questions. This is an ideal time to engage shareholders and offer clear and informative answers.

After you analyse the results, you will be able to predict many of the questions the audience is likely to ask, so ensure that you run through these scenarios with the presenters before the results meeting. However, it is also worth practising with other team members asking questions off the cuff so that the presenters can field them and get used to being agile in case of unexpected questions.

It is a good idea to have all of the major facts and figures close at hand and on one sheet of paper so that you can easily refer to them when answering questions.

8. Revise your guidance

If you provide guidance, you should look into whether it needs revision in light of the market and your performance. Have there been dramatic changes that have affected your financial statements in the first half of the year? You should also think about how accurate you can be given all the external factors. A good rule of thumb is to under promise and then overdeliver. Give yourself some room to use as a buffer if needed.

Make sure that you are open and honest about the reasons for the business performance and revising your guidance. You should state whether the factors behind the decision are temporary or whether they will be ongoing changes to your business model. This provides clarity for investors.

9. Rehearse the meeting

Rehearsing the content of the meeting not only helps the presenters familiarise themselves with the script and the key messages, but it also helps you check that it makes sense, covers all bases and does not repeat itself. All of this is easier to ascertain when you read it out loud.

Having had a dry run in advance will make it more relaxed and natural sounding when it comes to the half-year results meeting. This makes it easier for the audience to follow and ensures that the presenters sound confident in the message they deliver.

10. Keep it interactive

The ‘engagement’ part of investor engagement is the key here. These are stakeholders who are important to the successful growth of the business and they should be able to have their say on the financial results and feel involved. Webcasting provides opportunities to engage with shareholders across the world or who are otherwise unable to attend in person, as well as those at the event itself.

There are a host of messaging and call features to allow this interaction to form an important part of the meeting, integrating perfectly into the event.

Conclusion With transparency and engagement high on the priority list for IROs, webcasting your half-year results meeting or full-year report is the perfect solution for your investor relations efforts. In accordance with local legislation, you might also be able to stream your annual general meeting and many other types of events. Whatever the style you opt for, be it live streaming an in-person meeting, holding a hybrid event or going fully online, there is a webcasting method that will suit you. If you want to learn more about webcasting your half-year results meeting, you can request a demo with Company Webcast right now.

 

Tips for improving your internal communication!

There are many different types of internal communication. Traditionally, communication within an organisation is focused on transmitting information, but this has limited effect because it fails to actively engage the employees. There’s clearly room for improvement! The use of new internal communication resources can lead to significantly better results. In this blog, we give you three reasons why it’s beneficial to improve the internal communication within your organisation.

The current state of internal communication

Almost 50% of the respondents in an international survey by Epicom say that they find it difficult to use internal communication to increase employee engagement with their organisation. Furthermore, the survey reveals that today’s internal communication is static; there is little to no interaction with employees. The research also identified a number of other limiting factors, including:

• Lack of management support
• Lack of time
• Problems with reaching employees

Good internal communication ensures that managers and employees understand one another as well as each other’s responsibilities. Besides that, effective internal communication leads to higher employee motivation and better long-term performance.

Trends in 2021

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the remote working that ensued, nowadays, there is a clear trend towards using increasingly interactive internal communication. As hybrid-remote working will become the ‘new normal’, this will create both advantages and disadvantages. For example, colleagues are less likely to see each other at the office, which will make it more challenging for organisations to maintain a high level of engagement. As a result, communication professionals will need to look for new tools that support a more interactive approach to internal communication. There are numerous reasons why interactive communication is a good idea within an organisation. In our view, these are the top three reasons to consider:

1.  The value of openness

If you want to give your employees a voice, they first need to know what is going on within the organisation. It is therefore important to be transparent in your employee communication. Celebrate the successes when things go well! And if something doesn’t go according to plan, acknowledge it and then try to find a solution together. Enter into dialogue with your employees. Rather than being afraid of their criticism, use it as input for improving your organisation’s performance. According to research, transparent internal communication leads to:

• Engaged employees. Employees understand what is going on within a company and which choices are being made.
• Motivated employees. Because your employees become increasingly more engaged and involved with the organisation, they are motivated to work harder.

2.Employee productivity

To improve the transparency of your communication with employees, you will need to look beyond just intranet and email. A great solution is to use webinars to share periodic and incidental updates. Webinars offer several benefits – not only for you as an employer, but also for your employees. For example, they have the opportunity to ask questions in the chat during a live broadcast, they can share their opinions in polls, and much more! As a result, your employees feel heard and understood, which boosts their productivity and motivation.

3.  Clear language expands your reach

Try to keep your internal content as clear and concise as possible. Break information down into bite-sized portions, using simple language and lots of visuals. This not only helps your employees grasp the information more easily, but they are also more likely to remember it. As a result, they will act on the new information faster and also be more inclined to share it with their colleagues.

Communicating bite-sized pieces of content transparently and making it easy for employees to provide feedback will significantly improve your internal communication. The two key advantages of webinars are:

• Webinars are transparent because they involve employees in decisions and also enable them to provide their feedback
• Webinars are easy to understand because they are based on visual content which reinforces the message for the viewers

If this has inspired you to start using professional webinars to improve your internal communication, download our checklist now. If you have any questions or would like to know more, contact us. We can provide you with all the tools you need to broadcast a professional webinar.

Other interesting sources:

• Survey: ‘Internal communications monitor 2020’
• Blog: ‘Webinars: the ideal solution for effective internal communications’
• Webinars for internal communication
• Ebook: ‘Webinars for internal communication’
• Benefits of webinars

Webinars: the ideal solution for effective internal communication 

It’s a very topical challenge: your organisation has multiple locations, but you can’t hold meetings in real life and it’s absolutely essential to keep all your employees informed about and engaged with the key decisions and developments within your company. You may well be currently using Teams, Meet or Zoom for that purpose. However, there’s a growing demand for a more professional solution, and we have just the answer: webinars.

Online meetings are no longer simply one of the options – they are pretty much the only option we have right now in a world where everything is being done online. But you do have a choice in how you hold your online meetings. It can be tempting to opt for the standard solutions such as Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or Zoom. After all, you’ve been using them for a while now and they feel familiar and comfortable. But there’s a ‘but’. Are they truly effective in reaching your employees, and are your meetings having the desired impact? Or do you want more?

The 7 advantages of professional webinars

Now that in-person annual company meetings or other internal gatherings aimed at sharing information with employees and strengthening their engagement are no longer possible, a webinar is the best substitute – providing it’s a professionally organised webinar, that is. Here are the top seven benefits.  

1. Webinars offer a better audio-visual experience. You’re assured of good sound and image quality thanks to high-tech equipment and HD broadcasts. 
2. There are no technology issues with webinars, so you don’t have to worry about viewers struggling to log in, plus you are ensured a reliable and secure connection.
3. Webinars reinforce your corporate identity. Rather than seeing a speaker on a laptop in their own living room, viewers see a presenter in a professional studio setting with the look and feel of your own organisation.
4. Good webinars are taken care of from start to finish. You don’t have to do a thing, everything is done for you – right down to the speakers’ make-up, if desired – even if you decide to broadcast the webinar from your own location.
5. Webinars are inspiring. Using Q&As and polls makes your webinar interactive and more enjoyable and keeps viewers attentive and engaged. That’s how you transform a meeting into a memorable experience.  
6. Webinars have extensive reach. And if employees can’t attend the live event, they can watch the on-demand version when it suits them, in HD and on any device. This enables you to reach around 80% of your intended audience.
7. Webinars are valuable. The interactive elements can give you lots of useful feedback and information – and you can use those insights to make informed decisions for your organisation. 

A professional webinar as alternative to real-life meetings and events

Everyone is in agreement that online meetings are the best substitute for real-life meetings, so it’s just a matter of choosing between a standard solution and a custom-developed webinar. Whatever you choose, an added bonus is that online meetings are more sustainable than getting together in person, because attendees don’t have to travel and that means fewer greenhouse gas emissions. 

From a substitute to a new way of working

There’s no denying that a webinar is more costly than organising a meeting using one of the standard platforms. However, it’s still cheaper than hiring a venue with catering. Looking ahead, we can safely assume that the number of large-scale gatherings will never completely return to previous levels. Fewer people will want to attend such meetings, plus companies have now seen that things can – and must – be done more intelligently, more efficiently and more cost-effectively.

Solutions such as Teams, Meet and Zoom all work fine for regular meetings, which is the reason so many of us are using them so extensively. But for bigger meetings that need to have more impact, there is a lot to be said for the strength of professionally organised webinars. They can help you to make an important difference with your next internal communication event. 

Ultimately, it all comes down to which webinar partner you choose, so make sure you opt for certainty, experience and a proven track record. For extra inspiration, read the success stories of DSM and Heineken, two companies that are already using webinars for their internal communication.  

 

If you are interested in using webinars as part of your own internal communication strategy and you need more help or inspiration, please don’t hesitate to contact us or to download some of our free tools.

Why the 2021 AGM season will be different (And how to prepare)

The AGM season in 2020 faced a series of major challenges as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across Europe. Numerous shareholder meetings were postponed and re-organised, with businesses having to adjust their attendance and voting procedures to take into account restrictions on large gatherings and their own country’s regulatory requirements. 

One of the major disruptions to the AGM season as a result of COVID-19 was the restriction of live voting rights. Companies sought to overcome this hurdle and continue to allow shareholders to submit questions and have their say over proceedings in different ways. Governments across the European markets passed emergency legislation to allow issuers to adapt to the unprecedented conditions and still fulfil their responsibilities to their shareholders without the ability to hold the usual in-person events.  

Across the main European markets, shareholders had their live voting rights restricted, in 79.6% of cases. More than 90% of shareholder meetings in the UK, Germany, France, Switzerland and Italy formulated these restrictions, with just over three-quarters of AGMs in the Netherlands following suit. In contrast, only 2.85% of Spanish AGMs restricted live voting and there were no restrictions at all in Denmark. A Royal Decree in Belgium allowed companies to require shareholders to vote only by proxy or electronically in advance of the AGM, meaning many investors could not take part in live voting.

As the reality of the extended pandemic became obvious, many companies across the globe took advantage of the temporarily relaxed rules and shifted their events either entirely online or to a hybrid format. However, with no fixed date on when large gatherings will be allowed again, it seems like virtual shareholder meetings could continue into 2021. 

Download the full eBook to find out what to expect in 2021, how to prepare and why it might just form the blueprint for the future.