Accounting Skills for New Supervisors
Many of us flinch when we hear terms like depreciation, cash flow, balance sheet, and (worst of all!) budgets. However, these are all important concepts to understand if you’re going to succeed in today’s business world, particularly as a supervisor. Even better, financial terms are not as scary as they seem!
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.
Advanced Project Management
It’s easy to forget the “manager” part of your “project manager” title among the other range of activities you are responsible for. However, your management skills are an important part of your success as a project manager, so it is crucial that you grow both of those skill sets. There are also some advanced project management techniques that you can master to help bring your projects to successful completion.
This workshop presumes that participants have a thorough understanding of project management, including topics such as preparing a statement of work, setting project goals, scheduling, budgeting, managing project risks, and executing a project.
Advanced Writing Skills
This is a one-day advanced writing skills workshop for those who already are good writers. Our time will be devoted to writing letters of recommendation, of persuasion, of refusal, or of action, that reflect current word usage and up-to-date formats. You can also learn some basics about writing business cases, proposals, and reports.
An Environmental Audit Primer
This course provides participants with the knowledge and skills to conduct internal environmental audits. Practical, proven techniques for planning, conducting, and reporting on internal environmental audits will be introduced. Role-plays and case studies based on actual audits will be used to reinforce the concepts and provide participants with practice in applying the principles to situations typically encountered during internal auditing.
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.
Balanced Scorecard Basics
Over the past several decades, organizations have come to realize that success cannot only be measured in dollars and cents. Intangible assets (like a company’s reputation, the knowledge base created by their employees, and training initiatives) can make up a huge portion of a company’s wealth.
It only makes sense, then, that we need a new tool to help us measure this expanded definition of success. Enter the balanced scorecard! This tool and its related components will help your organization identify, document, plan, and execute a balanced strategic mission. It will also help your organization evaluate and revise its strategic execution.
Being A Team Player
Teamwork is essential in any successful enterprise, and to have effective teams, an organization must be comprised of individuals who pride themselves on being great team players. Many of us consider ourselves to be team players, but are we really? Do we know what that takes; and what managers consider to be the qualities that make a person a team player, or that make a good team player a ‘great’ team player? Everyone brings their own skills and strengths to the table; understanding how to use those skills within the context of a team is vital to help an organization succeed.
Beyond Workplace Politics: Using Social and Emotional Competencies
Workplace politics encompasses the power and authority processes and behaviors that are at work in a particular workplace. It is how the links between people in the workplace work. There are workplace politics at play in every organization!
In 1990, two American psychologists (Dr. Jack Mayer and Dr. Peter Salovey) purported that if there was a cognitive intelligence or IQ then there must be an emotional intelligence (sometimes known as EQ). Daniel Goleman, the co-founder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) theorized the social aspect of behavior as a complement to the emotional. His definition expanded to: “Social and emotional intelligence involves understanding your feelings and behaviors, as well as those of others, and applying this knowledge to your interactions and relationships.” In his work with CASEL he developed five interrelated sets of Social and Emotional Competencies: Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, Good Relationship Skills, and Responsible Decision Making. This course will explore the social and emotional competencies and their role in working beyond workplace politics!
Budgets and Managing Money
For managers in today’s business world, it’s essential to have a working knowledge of finance. We all play a role in our organization’s financial health, whether we realize it or not. If you don’t have training or a background in finance, you may be at a disadvantage as you sit around the management table.
Understanding the cycle of finance will help you figure out where you fit into your company’s financial structure, and how to keep your department out of the red. This two-day workshop will help you prepare budgets and make decisions with confidence.
Building Self Esteem and Assertiveness Skills
A healthy self-esteem is essential for growth and achieving success. Of all the judgments you make in life, none is as important as the one you make about yourself. Without some measure of self-worth, life can be painful and unrelenting. In this one-day workshop, participants will discover some techniques that can dramatically change how they feel about themselves, and how they approach the world to get the things that they want.
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 Ethics For The Office
What exactly makes a decision ethical? The problem with ethics is that what may seem morally right (or ethical) to one person may seem appalling to another.
This workshop will not provide you with an easy way to solve every ethical decision you will ever have to make. It will, however, help you define your ethical framework to make solving those ethical dilemmas easier. We’ll also look at some tools that you can use when you’re faced with an ethical decision. And, we’ll look at some techniques you can use so you don’t get stuck in an ethical quandary. Best of all, we’ll look at a lot of case studies so that you can practice making decisions in a safe environment.
Business Process Management
Business process management helps organizations leverage processes to achieve their goals and be successful. Once processes are implemented, they must be monitored, evaluated, and optimized to make sure they are still meeting the goals that they were designed to accomplish. A business that can successfully manage its processes is able to maintain a competitive edge, while increasing productivity and efficiency and decreasing costs.
This course will introduce participants to business process management. Students will learn how business processes can help improve their company’s bottom line by providing a higher level of quality and consistency for customers.
Business Writing That Works
We all know what good writing is. It’s the novel we can’t put down, the poem we never forgot, and the speech that changes the way we look at the world. Good writing is the memo that gets action and the letter that says what a phone call can’t.
In business writing, the language is concrete, the point of view is clear, and the points are well expressed. Good writing is hard work, and even the best writers get discouraged. However, with practice you can feel more confident about your own writing. This two-day workshop will give participants the tools to become better writers.
Change Management: Change and How to Deal With It
Change is something that excites people who love opportunities for growth, to see and learn about new things, or who like to shift the status quo. Some changes, however, are harder to adjust to and lead to expressions of resistance and anger. We can take concrete steps to make change more palatable by understanding people’s hesitation, enlisting the help of others, setting up plans, and managing stressors. These steps can also ensure that desired changes are implemented successfully.
In this one-day workshop, you will learn how to manage and cope with change and how to help those around you too.
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.
Collaboration
Collaboration is a skill that is utilized with one or more people to produce or create a result or shared goal. Everyone in the group has a shared vision or outcome. The group not only has to work together, they must think together, and the product comes from group effort. Collaborators are equal partners. Do we know what it takes to achieve successful collaboration with colleagues? What are the importance and benefits of collaboration in the workplace and how can employers create a collaborative environment and reward employees for collaborative efforts?
Communication Strategies
Have you ever wondered why it seems so difficult to talk with some people and so easy to talk with others? Can you recall an occasion where you met someone for the first time and immediately liked that person? Something about the individual made you feel comfortable.
A major goal of this workshop is to help participants understand the impact that their communication skills have on other people. They will also explore how improving these skills can make it easier for them to get along in the workplace, and in life.
Conducting Accurate Internet Research
As the Internet grows, it becomes more challenging to find the correct information from a reliable source in a timely manner. As research expert Gary Price puts it, “The haystack is growing and finding the needles takes more time and requires greater skill.”
This one-day course will teach students how to conduct accurate Internet research by creating a search plan, searching both the surface web and the deep web, and staying organized. Students will also learn how to think critically and find the best sources for their Internet search.
Continuous Improvement with Lean
Companies everywhere, no matter what their industry, can benefit from the principles of continuous improvement with Lean. Whether they adopt a very formal process or commit to something less structured, they can follow its principles and improve their bottom line by reducing wasted time and resources.
This course is designed for learners who have completed the pre-requisite Lean Process Improvement course, and perhaps have been involved in implementation of its principles in their workplace. It is the ideal next step along the path of learning and creating a workplace culture committed to continuous improvement.
Creating a Dynamite Job Portfolio
The job market continues to change, as does the way we look for work. This course examines the value of presenting yourself as a complete package by using a resume as an introduction to an employer and backing it up with a portfolio presented at the interview.
In order to make the most of this course, participants need to have recently completed the Getting Your Job Search Started course, or identified target positions and completed a full skills assessment and goal setting exercise.
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.
Creating Successful Staff Retreats
A staff retreat can evoke some pretty strong emotions. Dread of a week hanging around with people you would never invite home for dinner. Queasy thinking about throwing yourself backwards hoping your ‘new friends’ will catch you. However, staff retreats still continue even in hard times. Why?
Many of the things we really need to get done take longer than the two hours you have in meeting time. As well, the retreat itself can bring about a change in approach not possible sitting in your boardroom for a meeting. This course will give you tools to be able to create staff retreats that are successful and help to bolster productivity, sales and positive workplace culture.
Creating Winning Proposals
Proposals are persuasive documents that are fundamental tools in organizational funding and output. This course will look at sources of funding, types of proposals and how to write proposals that will meet funding agencies requirements. This will include a number of tips and techniques to increase the potential success of your proposals.
An important but often overlooked aspect of proposal writing will also be covered- Building and Maintaining Relationships. Relationships are built on honesty. Potential projects must be a good fit for your organization and your organization must be ready to do the work contained in the proposal. The most successful proposals are going to be those that fulfill the mission and values of your organization and that of the funding agencies as well!
Creative Thinking and Innovation
Creative thinking and innovation are vital components in both our personal and professional lives. However, many people feel as though they are lacking in creativity. What most of us do not recognize is that we are creative on a daily basis, whether it’s picking out what clothes to wear in the morning or stretching a tight budget at work. While these tasks may not normally be associated with creativity, there is a great deal of creativity involved to get those jobs done.
While some people seem to be simply bursting with creativity, others find it a struggle to think outside the square. If you fall into the latter category, it is important to understand that boosting your creative and innovative abilities takes practice. Recognizing and honing your own creative potential is a process. That’s what this two-day workshop is all about.
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.
Critical Thinking
In today’s society, many people experience information overload. We are bombarded with messages to believe various ideas, purchase things, support causes, and lead our lifestyle in a particular way. How do you know what to believe? How do you separate the truth from the myths?
The answer lies in critical thinking skills. The ability to clearly reason through problems and to present arguments in a logical, compelling way has become a key skill for survival in today’s world. This two-day workshop will give you some practical tools and hands-on experience with critical thinking and problem solving.
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.
Developing a High Reliability Organization
Today’s world is full of the unexpected. System failures, terrorism events, disease outbreaks, and superstorms disrupt businesses every day, sometimes to an unrecoverable point. Despite these challenges, some services (such as power plants, hospitals, and airports) have no choice but to continue operating.
This one-day course will explore how these organizations maintain high reliability even in times of serious crisis and stability. We will share their secrets in a way that can be applied to all organizations in order to create high reliability and continued success.
Developing a Safety Procedures Manual
Safety procedures are the backbone of an organization’s Safety Management System. They provide consistency and when followed create a safe working environment and greater productivity due to less injury down time. However, safety procedure writing is more difficult and time consuming than it at first appears. This one-day course will give you the foundation to start writing effective safety procedures.
Developing a Training Needs Analysis
The right training at the right time can make a huge difference in the productivity and profitability of your organization. Whether you are scanning your workplace for opportunities to make things better and training is the answer, or a client asks you to come into their organization and do an assessment, your answer is best framed in the form of a training needs analysis.
Your ability to create an analysis that is comprehensive yet simply prepared is critical for it to be understood and acted upon. This one-day workshop will help you to gather the information, assess the data, and present your suggestions for training or non-training solutions.
Developing Your Training Program
Training is an essential element of development in any organization. Being knowledgeable and continuing to learn throughout your career can make you a very valuable asset. We also know that training and orientation (or ‘onboarding’) for newly hired employees is a key factor in retention.
This two-day workshop is designed for a trainer who wants to develop training programs that are meaningful, practical, and will benefit both trainees and the organizations they work for.
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.
Dynamite Sales Presentations
A great sales presentation does not demand that you have all the bells and whistles to impress the client with your technical skills. Rather, try impressing your clients with your knowledge of the products and services you sell and your understanding of their problems and the solutions they need.
This one-day workshop will help teach you how to create a winning proposal and how to turn it into a dynamite sales presentation.
Effective Planning and Scheduling
As project managers and leads, we all know how difficult it can be to accurately determine the duration of a project, yet that is exactly what is expected of us on a regular basis. This workshop will not disclose the secret of creating an accurate schedule, because there isn’t one. However, it will provide the factors and fundamental elements that you should consider and address when creating any type of schedule.
Participants should complete the Intermediate Project Management workshop prior to this course or have equivalent knowledge. This course presumes that participants:
- Can define projects and project management
- Understand a project’s life cycle
- Are familiar with the basics of project planning and scheduling
- Know how to complete a Statement of Work and/or a project charter
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence, also called EQ, is the ability to be aware of and to manage emotions and relationships. It’s a pivotal factor in personal and professional success. IQ will get you in the door, but it is your EQ, your ability to connect with others and manage the emotions of yourself and others, that will determine how successful you are in life.
We have all worked with and listened to brilliant people. Some of them were great and… well, some were not so great. The mean and the meek and all those in between can teach us more than they realize. When we look at the truly extraordinary people who inspire and make a difference you will see that they do this by connecting with people at a personal and emotional level. What differentiated them was not their IQ but their EQ – their emotional intelligence.
Employee Accountability
An article in the March 11, 2010 edition of TIME magazine purported to explain “why we have entered the post-trust era.” Indeed, we seem to be in a time where people act inappropriately and then refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Who can we blame for the world economic crisis, or issues with religion, or the outcomes of our governments, or the state of the environment? More to the point, why do we spend so much time and energy looking to pin the blame on someone (usually anyone but ourselves)?
With this in mind, it’s no wonder that organizations who promote accountability are more successful and more productive. In this one-day workshop, you will learn about what accountability is, how to promote it in your organization, and how to become more accountable to yourself and others.
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.
Encouraging Sustainability and Social Responsibility in Business
The ideas behind encouraging sustainability and social responsibility in business seem noble, as organizations commit to creating optimal circumstances for people to live and work. The reality is that every company, whether it is a micro-business or a large multinational corporation, can take steps to create sustainable, socially responsible environments that contribute to positive workplaces, communities, and futures.
English as a Second Language: A Workplace Communications Primer
“A different language is a different vision of life,” said the Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini. Employees who use English as a second language demonstrate great commitment and skill in learning a language other than their native tongue. There are subtle differences between languages because of social influences and workplace demands that can create or strengthen the language barrier for employees who have learned a language other than English in their formative years. That barrier is an obstacle for both employer and employee, severing what could be productive relationships with co-workers and clients.
This course will identify any gaps in communication as the result of cultural language differences, and provide exercises to help connect those gaps. This course is written for employees with intermediate competency in English as their second language. Exercises will explore the four main categories of communication: Speaking, Listening, Reading and Writing.
Environmental Sustainability: A Practical Approach to Greening Your Organization
Environmental Management Systems (EMS) involve a set of processes and practices that enable an organization to reduce its environmental impacts and increase its operating efficiency. A well-designed EMS can help an organization address its regulatory demands in a systematic manner thereby reducing the risk of noncompliance. An EMS can also help address non-regulated issues such as pollution prevention, odor management, water usage and energy conservation.
In this one-day course participants will learn about EMS and how it can benefit their organization. Through the use of a Case Study and information they bring about their own company participants will leave with a draft EMS for their organization. It will include organizational Environmental Aspect and Impacts and Objectives and Targets for their organizations significant environmental impacts.
GDPR Readiness: Creating a Data Privacy Plan
The Data Privacy Plan is the best way an organization can document and enforce the privacy of personal information they hold. It puts in place procedures and guidance for how to properly handle data, respond to information requests, and deal with unexpected incidents or breaches. It contains information that applies to the day-to-day work of employees, as well as higher-level policies and guiding principles that apply to the company as a whole. The Data Privacy Plan is one of the best ways for an organization to become privacy compliant.
GDRP Readiness: Getting The Message Out
An important aspect of privacy compliance is communication, both internally and externally. Employees need to know that privacy-related policies and procedures exist in your organization, and they need to be instructed on their use. Customers also need to be informed about a company’s privacy practices, and be given the chance to ask questions. Good communication is essential for maintaining company transparency and is an important aspect of compliancy with data privacy laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation. While having written policies and procedures is the best starting place, getting the message out about privacy is a critical subsequent step in the process.
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.
Getting Stuff Done: Personal Development Boot Camp
Why are there so many different organizational systems and time management methods out there? The answer is simple: it’s like any other personal challenge, like weight loss or money management. There is no simple, one size fits all answer. You must build a solution that works for you.
Over the course of this two-day workshop, we will explore various time management and organizational tools and techniques so that you can build a customized productivity plan for your personal and professional lives. At the end of the course, you will emerge with a plan that works for you, so that you can start regaining control of your life!