Active Listening
Communication skills are at the heart of everything we do each day, whether at home, at work, or at play. Active listening encompasses the best of communication, including listening to what others are saying, processing the information, and responding to it in order to clarify and elicit more information. This course will help participants develop and practice their active listening skills.
Anger Management: Understanding Anger
Anger is a universal experience. Dogs get angry, bees get angry, and so do humans. You don’t have to be a psychologist to know that managing anger productively is something few individuals, organizations, and societies do well. Yet research tells us that those who do manage their anger at work are much more successful than those who don’t.
The co-worker who can productively confront his teammate about his negative attitude increases his team’s chance of success as well as minimizes destructive conflicts. The customer service agent who can defuse the angry customer not only keeps her customers loyal but makes her own day less troublesome. This one-day anger management workshop is designed to help give you and your organization that edge.
Appreciative Inquiry
Do you love those moments of exception, when everything seems to have come together and things are working beautifully? Would you like to create an environment where those rare extraordinary moments become the norm? Then you may just be ready to learn the value of Appreciative Inquiry, also known as AI. AI is a method for implementing change that is rooted in being positive, sharing stories of things that work well, and leveraging people’s strengths and the power of co-creation to initiate lasting, powerful changes that can make an organization the best it has ever been, because of people who care and are committed.
Building Better Teams
Teams are an important building block of successful organizations. Whether the focus is on service, quality, cost, value, speed, efficiency, performance, or other similar goals, teams are the basic unit that supports most organizations.
With teams at the core of corporate strategy, an organization’s success can depend on how well team members operate together. How are their problem-solving skills? Is the team enthusiastic and motivated to do its best? Do they work well together? This one-day course can help participants get there!
Bullying in the Workplace
Bullying is called the silent epidemic. Although half of workers have experienced or witnessed bullying, policies and laws dealing with it are far less prevalent. This is, in part, because bullying can be hard to identify and address. People wonder, what does bullying look like? How can we discourage it in our workplace? What can I do to protect my staff and co-workers?
Business Succession Planning: Developing and Maintaining a Succession Plan
Change is a hallmark of today’s business world. In particular, our workforce is constantly changing – people come and go and move into new roles within the company. Succession planning can help you make the most of that change by ensuring that when someone leaves, there is someone new to take their place. This one-day course will help you teach the basics about creating and maintaining a succession plan.
Code Of Conduct: Setting The Tone For Your Workplace
Workplaces are made up of diverse groups of people with diverse motivations, backgrounds, and ethics. When such groups are brought together, sometimes there are opportunities for ethical, moral, financial, or even legal, boundaries to be crossed. Sometimes those boundaries are crossed with disastrous results.
A workplace code of conduct is a tool that can be used to prevent such digressions by providing a framework for employees to follow of what is expected of them and how to conduct themselves in various situations.
This course will look at the material that goes into a code of conduct and will allow participants to build their own as the day goes on.
Conducting Effective Performance Reviews
Effective performance reviews are an essential component of employee development. The performance review meeting is an important aspect of career planning, and the outcomes of the meeting should be known to the employee and supervisor before the meeting actually takes place. Remember what the German philosopher Goethe said: “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of being.”
Setting goals and objectives to aim for will give both supervisors and employees a focus, and is one of the key aspects to meeting overall company objectives. Supervisors must also learn how to give feedback, both positive and negative, on a regular and timely basis so that employees can grow and develop. Performance appraisals involve all these activities.
Creating a Positive Work Environment
Not all of us have had the opportunity to work in a truly positive work environment. A positive work environment is important for the productivity of a company but it is also important to us personally. Our emotional and physical health can be improved by working in a positive work environment. We should wake up each morning wanting to go to work - not trying to think of excuses to not go.
We want to be proud of where we work and enjoy telling others about where we work. As an employee or a leader within a company you have a responsibility to create and maintain a positive work environment. Everyone has a responsibility to create and maintain a positive work environment. Even if this is not a companywide reality you can seek to provide this type of environment for your department/ division or those within your sphere of influence.
This one-day course will give you tools to be able to create the type of company environment that you crave through building and nurturing effective workplace relationships.
Creating a Top-Notch Talent Management Program
Organizations recognize that they do better business when their people are engaged, motivated, and yes, talented. Having the right people in place at the right time is a key aspect to continued growth, success, or even just stability. This course will provide you with just what it takes to have the right people ready. It will help you create a program to measure the talents of your people and how to help them grow in preparation for the future. It will also help you support and grow your organization by teaching you how to apply the most current research and adapt your organization to the ever-changing marketplaces.
Creating a Workplace Wellness Program
Whether you are creating a workplace wellness program from scratch, or enhancing what you already have, you’re already on the right track! With increasing costs of health care, a shrinking workforce, and aging workers, a savvy workplace understands the value in supporting workers to improve their conditioning and to live a fitter lifestyle. This two-day course includes all aspects of designing or upgrading a program, from concept through implementation, to review.
Crisis Management
Viable organizations need to be ready for emergencies because they are a fact of doing business. The worst plan is not to have any kind of plan at all, and the best plans are tested and adjusted so that they work over-time. Fortunately, you do not need separate plans for fire, weather disasters, and all the different kinds of crises that can occur. One solid plan will help you to prevent, respond, and recover from all crises. This two-day course will help you ensure your organization is ready to manage any kind of crisis.
Dealing With Difficult People
We can get into a routine where it feels like everyone we speak with is either having a bad day, or we are having a bad day ourselves. We feel like we constantly meet people who seem to be inconsiderate, stubborn, incorrigible, indecent, miserable, or passive-aggressive. Sometimes we can be equally awkward ourselves. While it might seem that the easiest remedy is to lock yourself up at home and avoid people, we eventually have to pick up the phone or step outside and have an interaction with somebody.
Success comes from understanding how we behave, as well as how we can influence others. If we approach difficulties as needing to take place in one or a series of conversations, and we approach those conversations with a plan, we will find that we have less difficult people to deal with. More often than not, we will also have more meaningful and significant conversations. In this one-day workshop, you will teach participants how to turn difficult situations into opportunities for growth.
Disability Awareness: Working with People with Disabilities
People with disabilities represent a significant and largely underutilized resource for businesses. Many disabled persons are underemployed or unemployed. As a result of advocates for diversity, as well as a shrinking labor pool, employers are taking a serious look at hiring and retaining people with disabilities. This two-day workshop will give supervisors, managers, and human resource consultants tools and tips for creating a diverse workplace.
Diversity Training: Celebrating Diversity in the Workplace
More than ever, a workplace is a diverse collection of individuals proud of who they are: their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion, their ethnic background, and all the other components that make an individual unique. One of the challenges for workplace leaders is how to help these diverse individuals work as a team.
We all know what happens to organizations that don’t have effective teamwork: they fail. And, failing to embrace diversity can also have serious legal costs for corporations. This one-day workshop will give you ways to celebrate diversity in the workplace while bringing individuals together.
Employee Dispute Resolution Mediation through Peer Review and Goal Setting
Have you ever been in a workplace situation where a supervisor has made a decision that you didn’t agree with? Did you wish that you could ask someone else what they thought of the decision; whether they would have done the same thing? The peer review process offers employees just that chance, using a formalized procedure to ask, consider, and resolve just these sorts of questions. This one-day workshop will teach you everything you need to know about employee dispute resolution through mediation.
Generation Gap: Closing the Generation Gap in the Workplace
There are currently five generations in the workforce, and employers faced with mass retirements of Baby Boomers are looking for ways to prepare for the changes that will result. This course examines the history and reality of the generation gap.
This course explores whether defining the actual limits of each generation is most important, or whether the merits of people within the context of employment is the bigger issue. Understanding others helps us to understand ourselves and to manage the people that we work with. We will explore problems, solutions, and strategies to help overcome issues of the generation gap.
Getting Along in The Workplace
Many people see conflict as a negative experience. In fact, conflict is a necessary part of our personal growth and development. Think of when you were trying to choose your major in college, for example, or trying to decide between two jobs.
However, conflict becomes an issue when the people involved cannot work through it. They become engaged in a battle that does not result in growth. When this type of conflict arises, negative energy can result, causing hurt feelings and damaged relationships.
This course will give participants the tools that will help you resolve conflict successfully and produce a win-win outcome.
Giving Effective Feedback
As human beings, we often hunger for feedback. However, many people will tell you that when they do get feedback, it’s often because of something they have done wrong. This one day course is designed to help workplace leaders learn how to provide feedback any time that the message is due. Whether feedback is formal or informal, and whether it is provided to employees, peers, or someone else, there are ways that it can be structured to be effective and lasting.
This course will help participants learn why the way we deliver feedback is important, how to deliver a message so that people accept it and make changes that may be needed, and how to accept feedback that we are offered.
Hiring for Success: Behavioural Interviewing Techniques
Interviewing sounds easy enough: you arrange for a conversation between you and potential candidates, and then select the best person for a particular position. But what if you could refine the process in such a way that you were confident that you are selecting the right person? How do you separate the good from the great, when they have similar work experience and strengths to offer? This workshop will give you the skills and tools to hire successful candidates.
Human Resources Training: HR for the Non-HR Manager
In today’s fast-moving world, many managers and supervisors are expected to deal with some human resource issues. They may be asked to take part in developing job descriptions, take part in interviews, or take responsibility for discipline. This three-day workshop will introduce those managers to human resource concepts. We will walk you through the hiring process, from performing a skills inventory to conducting the interview; discuss orientation; and cover some issues that arise after the hiring (such as diversity issues, compensation, and discipline).
Managing Difficult Conversations
We have so many interactions in the run of a day, it’s reasonable to expect that some of them are going to be difficult. Whether these are conversations that you have in person, or you manage a virtual team and need to speak with someone in another city, there are things that you can do to make these conversations go smoothly. This one-day workshop will give you the tools to manage difficult conversations and get the best results possible out of them.
Onboarding: The Essential Rules for a Successful Onboarding Program
Did you know that most employees decide to leave a job within their first 18 months with an organization? When an employee does leave, it usually costs about three times their salary to replace them.
You can greatly increase the likelihood that a new employee will stay with you by implementing a well-designed onboarding program that will guide the employee through their first months with the company.
Orientation Handbook: Getting Employees Off to a Good Start
An effective human resource professional knows that managing employee performance is more than responding to problems, conducting performance reviews, or hiring staff. Performance management begins with an orientation to the organization and the job and continues on a daily basis as employees are trained and coached.
A thoughtful new employee orientation program, coupled with an employee handbook (or website) that communicates workplace policies, can reduce turnover and those reductions save your organization money. Whether your company has two employees or a thousand employees, don’t leave employee retention to chance. Engage them from the moment they are hired; give them what they need to feel welcome and let them impress you with what they bring to your company. This two-day workshop is just the start that you need!
Performance Management: Managing Employee Performance
Problem Solving & Decision Making
We make decisions and solve problems continually. We start making decisions before we even get out of bed (shall I get up now or not?). Sometimes, we will have made as many as 50 decisions by the time we leave for work. Despite all the natural decision making that goes on and the problem solving we do, some people are very uncomfortable with having to make decisions. You may know someone who has a hard time making decisions about what to eat, never mind the internal wrestling they go through in order to take on major decisions at work.
Likewise, we’ve probably all looked at a solution to something and said, “I could have thought of that.” The key to finding creative solutions is not just creativity, although that will certainly help. The answer rests in our ability to identify options, research them, and then put things together in a way that works. Having a process to work through can take the anxiety out of problem solving and make decisions easier. That’s what this two-day workshop is all about.
Safety in the Workplace
Workplace accidents and injuries cost corporations millions of dollars and thousands of hours lost every year. They also have a profound, often lifelong impact on workers. Introducing a safety culture into your organization, where safety is valued as an integral part of the business’s operation, not only saves the business time and money, it also builds a committed, loyal, healthy workforce. This one-day workshop will give participants the foundation to start building your safety culture.
Stress Management
Today’s workforce is experiencing job burnout and stress in epidemic proportions. Workers at all levels feel stressed out, insecure, and misunderstood. Many people feel the demands of the workplace, combined with the demands of home, have become too much to handle. This one-day workshop explores the causes of such stress, and suggests general and specific stress management strategies that people can use every day.
Talking To Employees About Personal Hygiene
As a manager, you’re probably used to dealing with tough situations: employees who insist on being late, team members who miss deadlines, and staff members who can’t get along. But conversations about an employee’s personal appearance are a whole different ball game. It’s something that we often avoid talking about, or worse, make light of.
This one-day workshop has two major themes. First, we’ll give you a framework for having those tough conversations. We’ll also give you some guidelines for customizing that framework for your organization. Then, we’ll look at some common tough conversations that come up, including body odor, flatulence, poor clothing and hair decisions, and bad breath. At the end of the workshop participants will have a chance to role play a tough situation. You’ll walk away well prepared for any kind of challenging conversation.
Workplace Ergonomics: Injury Prevention Through Ergonomics
The human body is a fragile system, and we put many demands on it every day. Activities like reaching to get supplies off of a shelf, sitting in front of a computer for hours every day, and moving heavy products around the shop can all take a toll on our bodies. In this two-day workshop, you will learn how to make your environment as ergonomic as possible in order to make daily tasks easier on your body and mind.
Workplace Harassment: What It Is and What To Do About It
In 2012 alone, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ordered that $365,400,000 (that’s 365.4 million dollars!) be paid out for discrimination and harassment charges. No wonder companies are working to be more proactive in preventing harassment.
But how do you prevent harassment from occurring? What sorts of policies should be in place? What should managers do to protect their employees? And if a complaint is filed, what will we do? All of these questions (and more!) will be answered in this two-day workshop.
Workplace Health and Safety: The Supervisor’s Role and Responsibilities
This course aims to provide an understanding of the supervisor’s role in organizational health and safety. It will explore the requirements of due diligence, the rights of workers, supervisor and worker health and safety requirements, employee competency, and the role of Health and Safety Committees. The course will also look at supervisor’s roles in hazard identification and control, accident reporting and investigation and the importance of communicating health and safety information.
This course will highlight the most important aspects of the supervisor’s role so that they can participate effectively in health and safety responsibilities and work towards the continual improvement of health and safety performance in their organization.
Workplace Violence: How to Manage Anger and Violence in the Workplace
Violence of any sort has many roots. Sometimes there are warning signs of workplace violence, but this is not always the case. It is up to us to learn whatever we can to prevent, identify, and mitigate any threats, and this comprehensive workshop includes everything a workplace leader needs to get started.