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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.

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!

Body Language: Reading Body Language As A Sales Tool

Body language can make or break our efforts to establish long, trusting relationships. Our body language can help to reinforce and add credibility to what we say, or it can contradict our words. Understanding what signals you are sending, as well as being able to read the signals that your clients send, is an essential skill in sales and throughout our lives. What is your body language saying about you? Find out in this one day workshop!

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 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!

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The English language is recognized as an essential business tool throughout the world.

People who are learning English as a second language should be aware that even native English speakers can misunderstand the meaning and intent of communication in the workplace.

Employees with intermediate competency in English as their second language will gain the most from this course.

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.

Introduction to E-Mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is here to stay, and knowing how to do it well is essential for marketers as well as small business owners, coaches, and consultants. In this two-day workshop you’ll learn the essentials of planning, creating, and delivering exceptional e-mail marketing campaigns that support your overall marketing strategy. After this workshop, you will be able to reach more clients and potential clients through your efforts at being an e-mail influencer.

Inventory Management: The Nuts and Bolts

No business can survive very long without an effective program of controls over the parts and materials that are used in producing or distributing goods and services of the firm. Like many other things that depend on human interpretation, “control” means different things to different individuals. This is an introductory workshop for you, the warehouse or stockroom manager, the person in charge of what comes in and goes out of your company. You want a smooth and cost-effective operation, with enough products on hand to satisfy needs without stockpiling too much. This course will discuss all aspects of inventory management, including common terms, the inventory cycle, how to maintain inventory accuracy, and what some of the latest trends are.

Knowledge Management

Understanding how to manage the knowledge within your organization is the key to business success. Mismanagement of organizational knowledge comes with a price: frustrated employees, angry customers, and decreased productivity. All of these things can affect a business’ bottom line. The purpose behind knowledge management is to help us bridge organizational gaps and to use our greatest asset (our knowledge) to take our business performance to the next level.

The theory of knowledge management has emerged to help us harness and enhance both the individual and collective brain power of our businesses. This workshop will introduce participants to knowledge management tips, techniques, and proven processes.

Lean Process Improvement

Lean principles have come a long way over the past 300 years. From Benjamin Franklin’s early ideas, to Henry Ford’s work in the 1920’s and the Toyoda precepts in the 1930’s, to Jeffery Liker’s publication of The Toyota Way in 2004, Lean processes have evolved from a simple concept to a set of widely used best practices.

This two-day course will give participants the foundation to begin implementing Lean process improvement tools in their workplace. The first day will explore the foundations of Lean through the Toyota precepts and the five critical improvement concepts (value, waste, variation, complexity, and continuous improvement). The second day will give participants tools to perform continuous improvement in their organization, including 5S, 5W-2H, PDSA, DMAIC, Kaizen, Genchi Genbutsu, and various Lean data mapping methods.

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.

Marijuana and the Workspace: Issues, Impacts and Responsibilities

Marijuana is one of the most commonly used mind-altering substances in the world. As more jurisdictions consider tolerating, decriminalizing, or even legalizing the recreational use of marijuana, and as more people are granted licenses for the medicinal use of the drug, the greater is the likelihood that marijuana use will impact any individual workplace. Employees under the influence of marijuana can create a host of workplace issues, from decreased productivity to safety hazards. The best approach for an employer is to be proactive – to have a plan in place for preventing problems and responding to them if, and when, they occur.

Motivation Training: Motivating Your Workforce and Team

It’s no secret that employees who feel they are valued and recognized for the work they do are more motivated, responsible, and productive. This one-day workshop will help supervisors and managers create a more dynamic, loyal, and energized workplace. It is designed specifically to help busy managers and supervisors understand what employees want, and to give them a starting point for creating champions.

Planning for Workplace Safety

Beginning with the Organizational Safety Policy, the company’s Safety Plan shows that Senior Management takes the commitment to worker health and safety seriously. The safety plan provides a system of policies, procedures and practices to help prevent accidents/incidents, gives workers the knowledge to help them create a safe working environment and outlines a consistent methodology for the company’s approach to Health and Safety. It is one of the more important safety documents that a company can produce.

This workshop will give you the foundation to develop your Organizational Safety Plan and take the next step in building your safety culture.

Process Improvement with Gap Analysis

Charles Kettering, an inventor for General Motors, once said, “A problem well-stated is half-solved.” The gap analysis tool can help you define problems and identify areas for process improvement in clear, specific, achievable terms. It can also help you define where you want to go and how you are going to get there.

This one-day course will give you the skills that you need to perform an effective gap analysis that will solve problems, improve processes, and take your project, department, or organization to the next level.

Purchasing and Procurement Basics

Purchasing and procurement functions are about much more than bringing goods and services into an organization. They are the foundation of strong, collaborative relationships with suppliers. Since many companies source products from around the globe more frequently than ever, a procurement manager needs strong capabilities. These skills cannot just be learned on the job: they need to be taught. As well, the value of procurement is now recognized as an integral part of cost control within the organization.

In this course, you’ll learn the basics of procurement, including what a supply chain looks like, the purchasing cycle, essential tools and strategies for making the best purchasing relationships work, managing bids, and more.

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.

Six Sigma: Entering the Dojo

Six Sigma is a set of qualitative and quantitative quality tools that can help a business improve their processes. The efficiency built into the business processes brings about improved profits, confidence and quality. Ultimately this effort is there to ensure customer satisfaction. The term Six Sigma comes from statistics to indicate that the process outputs fall within three standard deviations from the center (expected value) giving a range of six standard deviations (or 6 sigma- 6 σ). As a result in terms of individual outputs it means you would have 3.4 defects per million items. This course is designed to introduce students to basic concepts of Six Sigma particularly in continuous process improvement. Various quality tools used in process improvements will be explored as well as the importance of customer relationships. Courses in Lean, quality and teams will provide knowledge on the other aspects of how Six Sigma works. It is a predecessor to studies in Six Sigma Yellow, Green and Black Belt.

Strategic Planning

If you and the people who work with you don’t understand where the company is going, they may all develop their own priorities and actually prevent you from getting where you need to be. Part of getting everyone on board is creating a strategic plan complete with the organization’s values, vision, and mission. Then, there’s the challenge of bringing these principles to life in a meaningful way that people can relate to. This two-day course will help you describe what you want to do and get people where you want to go.

The Minute Taker’s Workshop

No matter who you are or what you do, whether at work or in the community, you are likely involved in meetings. Meetings are costly, whether they are held in a company boardroom or at the local coffee shop. To ensure that meetings are productive and worth the expense involved, three ingredients are necessary: an assurance of closure, a strong chair or leader, and accurate minutes. It has been said that if accurate minutes have not been recorded, then the meeting may just as well not have taken place. If people can’t remember or agree on what actually occurred at a meeting, how can the group effectively accomplish its objectives? After this one-day workshop you will understand your role as a minute-taker and the

Using Activities to Make Training Fun

Most people have been at a party or some other social occasion where someone has told an inappropriate joke and ruined the mood (at least temporarily). Likewise, we’ve all been somewhere where the class clown is able to lighten the mood and help people have fun.

The good news is that humor can help you make your training sessions just as engaging as those fun social occasions. Even better, you don’t need to be the class clown or an award-winning comedian to do it. This one-day workshop will help you identify what kind of humor you can bring to the classroom, and how games can help you engage your participants.

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 Success: Eight Key Skills You’ll Need

There have been a number of studies that identify the key skills that workers need to be successful. Various studies call them different things - critical employability skills, soft skills, or transferrable skills. Regardless of the name these skills are critical for workplace success. Eight of the most commonly identified skills are: Being a Productive Team Member, Flexibility, Problem Solving, Resourcefulness, Giving and Receiving Feedback, Self-Confidence, Creative Thinking and Emotional Intelligence. Many of us possess one or more of these attributes already and perhaps all of them. Luckily these skills can be improved upon through training. This course looks to take you from where you are now to a new level of understanding for the key skills that will help to make you successful at work.