Human Resources

As an individual, facts and knowledge can only go so far. Solving tough problems requires the ability to define the true problem, analyze the possible causes, create options, select the most feasible option, and then implement it. This two-day workshop should help individuals enhance their efforts to find sustainable solutions and learn new ways to approach problem-solving to reach win-win decisions.

Key Learnings:

• Increase your awareness of problem solving steps and problem solving tools.
• Distinguish root causes from symptoms to identify the right solution for the right problem.
• Improve your problem solving and decision making skills through identifying your own problem solving style.
• Identify ways to think creatively and work towards creative solutions.
• Recognize the top ten rules of good decision-making.

Managers traditionally have had the task of contributing to the effectiveness of their organization while maintaining high morale. Today, these roles often have to be balanced off with the reality of implementing changes imposed by senior management. Managers who have an understanding of the dynamics of change are better equipped to analyze the factors at play in their own particular circumstances, and to adopt practical strategies to deal with resistance. This one-day workshop will help you deal with change and will give you strategies to bring back to your employees.

Key Learnings:

At the end of the workshop, you will be able to:

• Accept that there are no normal or abnormal ways of reacting to change
• See change as an essential element that is positive
• Recognize that adapting to change is all about attitude
• Identify the stages of change we go through as we learn to deal with change
• See change as an opportunity for self-motivation and innovation
• Develop strategies for dealing with and accepting changes in your organization

Inspiring someone to be their best is no easy task. Just how do you manage for optimum performance? How do you create a motivating environment that encourages people to go beyond their best? This one-day workshop will give you some of those skills.

Key Learnings:

• Understand the role of goal setting in performance management.
• Have tools to help your employees set and achieve goals.
• Have a three-phase model that will help you prepare employees for peak performance, activate their inner motivation, and evaluate their skills.
• Have a better knowledge of motivational tools and techniques.

Teams have become a principle building block of successful organizations. This one-day workshop is a basic course for team leaders and team members, designed to focus on the characteristics of an effective team player and the elements of an effective team. You will leave the workshop with plans for your personal development as a team player and ideas for developing your back-home team.

A critical element of this workshop is the Glen Parker Team Player Survey (PTPS), an 18 item self-assessment instrument that will help you identify your primary team player style, help you increase your personal effectiveness in team situations, and help you effectively develop your group into a high performing team.

Key Learnings:

• The PTPS will give you useful feedback about your team player style.
• Identify ways you will want to change to improve your team player style.
• Better understand and appreciate differences among team members.
• Identify those ways your team must improve to be more effective.
• Develop an action plan for those improvements.

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 workshop is to help give you and your organization that edge.

Key Learnings:

• Be better able to recognize how anger affects our bodies, our minds, and our behavior.
• Be better able to use the six-step method to break old patterns and replace them with a model for assertive anger.
• Be better able to control your own emotions when faced with other peoples’ anger.
• Be better able to identify ways to help other people safely manage some of their repressed or expressed anger.

All of us experience conflict. We argue with our spouses, disagree with our friends, and sometimes even quarrel with strangers at a hockey game. At times we lose sight of the fact that all this conflict is normal. So long as people are individuals there will be the potential for conflict. Since you can’t prevent conflict, the most important thing is to learn how to handle or manage it in productive ways. What is critical for resolving conflict is developing an understanding of, and a trust in, shared goals. It requires openness, discipline, and creativity. Showing respect for other people and not blaming them enables people to work for mutual benefit. These are the skills that you will develop in this two-day workshop.

Key Learnings:

• Understand what conflict is and how it can escalate.
• Recognize the five most common conflict resolution styles and when to use them.
• Increase positive information flow through non-verbal and verbal communication skills.
• Develop effective techniques for intervention strategies.
• Strengthen staff trust and morale.
• Become more confident of your ability to manage conflicts to enhance productivity and performance.

This workshop concentrates on the pre-interview preparation; developing questions and their value; the interview techniques that get specific, behavior-based examples of past performance; and the strategies that follow through on this process. This workshop takes the behavioral interview even further with a discussion of communication techniques and the use of other types of interview questions.

Key Learnings:

• Recognize the costs incurred by an organization when a wrong hiring decision is made.
• Develop a fair and consistent interviewing process for selecting employees.
• Prepare better job advertisements and use a variety of markets.
• Be able to develop a job analysis and position profile.
• Use traditional, behavioral, achievement oriented, holistic, and situational interview questions.
• Enhance communication skills that are essential for a skilled recruiter.
• Effectively interview difficult applicants.
• Check references more effectively.
• Understand the basic employment and human rights laws that can affect the hiring process.

One reason people change jobs is that they never feel truly welcome or a part of the organization they join. If a company spends considerable money recruiting, interviewing, and perhaps even relocating employees, it makes good sense to go one step further and make the new employee feel like they have made a good decision to come to this company.

A thoughtful new employee orientation program, coupled with an employee handbook that communicates workplace policies can reduce turnover and save that organization thousands of dollars. Whether your company has two employees or two thousand employees, don’t leave new employee orientation to chance.

Key Learnings:

• Understand how important an orientation program is to an organization.
• Identify the role of the human resource department in the orientation program.
• Recognize how the commitment curve affects both new employees and their managers.
• Know what companies can do to deliver their promise to new employees.
• Determine the critical elements of effective employee training.
• Establish the importance of having an employee handbook for new and long-term employees.

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 two-day 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.

Key Learnings:

• Apply the multifaceted aspects of talent management in their own organizations
• Describe the skills required to manage high potential candidates
• Recognize and foster talent within an organization
• Explain the principles of competency based management
• Use the language for talent management

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 develop, maintain, and evaluate your succession plan.

Key Learnings:

• Understand the value of succession planning for successful businesses.
• Develop expertise with the key elements of a succession plan.
• Create and discuss aspects of a succession plan.
• Discuss the elements of a succession plan in terms of roles, responsibility, function, scope, and evaluation.

Performance reviews are an essential component of employee development. Someone once said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” And, 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 supervisors and employees a unified focus and targets to aim for. 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.

Key Learnings:

• Recognize the importance of having a performance appraisal process for employees.
• Understand how to work with employees to set performance standards and goals.
• Develop skills in observing and giving feedback, listening and asking questions, for improved performance.
• Identify an effective interview process and have the opportunity to practice the process in a supportive atmosphere.
• Develop strategies for managing employee performance.

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 process. In this one-day workshop, you will cover all aspects of the process, from initiating the process, to choosing a facilitator and panel members, to having a hearing and making a decision.

Key Learnings:

• What the Peer Review process is
• How employees file grievances and how management should respond
• How a facilitator and a panel is chosen
• What is involved in the hearing process, from preliminary meetings to the hearing itself, to the decision process
• What responsibilities and powers a panel should have
• Questioning techniques
• Why peer review panels fail and how to avoid those pitfalls

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.

Key Learnings:

• Understand that stress is a positive, unavoidable part of everybody’s life
• Recognize the symptoms that tell you when you have chronic stress overload
• Identify those situations in your life that cause you the greatest stress
• Identify those actions which add to your stress
• Change the situations and actions that can be changed
• Deal better with situations and actions that can’t be changed
• Create an action plan for work, home, and play to help reduce and manage stress

The need for leading, promoting, and enhancing a customer-focused culture is essential within every organization. This one-day workshop will provide you with an opportunity to explore your responsibilities within your role as a customer service agent. As you discuss the various skills and techniques, you will draw from your own personal and varied experiences to share elements of reward and challenge. Consider this workshop as a re-energizing time to build and expand from where you are now.

Key Learnings:

• Identify ways to establish links between excellence in customer service and your business practices and policies.
• Develop the skills and practices that are essential elements of a customer service focused manager.
• Recognize what employees are looking for to be truly engaged.
• Recognize who the customers are and what they are looking for.
• Develop strategies for creating engaged employees and satisfied customers in whatever business units you manage.

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.

Key Learnings:

• Develop our understanding of where the generation gap issue surfaces, and the impact it has on the modern workforce.
• Understand and apply language that is specific to each generation currently in the workplace.
• Explore organization strategies that overcome gap issues.
• Evaluate the need and effectiveness of recruiting, retention, and succession plans in context of the generation gap.

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. Even better, financial terms are not as scary as they seem! During this two-day workshop, you will learn the basic financial skills that you need to become a successful, effective, supervisor.

Key Learnings:

• Understand the art of finance and financial management and your role in company finances
• Become familiar with key financial terms, including where to find regulations for your area and industry
• Become familiar with various types of financial reports, including income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and statements of retained earnings
• Understand how a chart of accounts is created, the differences between cash and accrual accounting, and single vs. double entry bookkeeping
• Understand how to identify and analyze important financial data to make financial decisions
• Know what budgets are and how to prepare them
• Identify what computer skills you need to make you a financial whiz
• Be prepared to deal with financial situations that impact the people that work for you

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. This two-day workshop will explore the benefits of onboarding, show you how to design an onboarding framework, give you ways to customize the program for different audiences (including managers and executives), and demonstrate how to measure results from the program. (Statistics from a 2007 study by the Wynhurst Group)

Key Learnings:

• Define onboarding and describe how it is different from orientation
• Identify the business benefits of onboarding
• List the factors that contribute to a successful onboarding program
• Build a team to create an onboarding program
• Prepare a vision statement and goals for an onboarding program
• Design a framework for an onboarding program that includes program setup, various types of training, games, progress tracking, follow-up
• Customize your onboarding framework
• Identify which metrics you should track to evaluate program results

Create a branded, unique program

This is a three-hour workshop describes the performance outcomes, skills, and knowledge required to manage personal work priorities and professional development. It involves developing habits and a way of thinking that will maximize output.

Key Learnings:

• You will learn how to manage personal work priorities including rituals, planning tools, and time management
• You will be able to determine the difference between urgency and importance of task completion
• You will learn what makes up a SMART goal
• You will experience real-world situations that all managers face and learn how to deal with them

Coach, Role Model, Counselor, Supporter, Guide,… do these words ring a bell? Being a coach involves being a role model, sometimes a counselor or supporter, and always a guide. Coaching is based on a partnership that involves giving both support and challenging opportunities to employees. Knowing how and when to coach is an essential skill that can benefit both you and your organization.

Key Learnings:

• You will understand how coaching can be used to develop your team
• You will develop the coaching skills that help improve individual performance
• You will be able to demonstrate the behaviors and practices of an effective coach
• You will recognize employees’ strengths and give them the feedback they need to succeed
• You will be able to identify employee problems and ways you can help to correct them

Recruiting and hiring staff is an expensive process. It is a huge investment in time and money for both the company as a whole and the individuals who are doing the hiring. However, the old adage of “work smarter, not harder” still applies. This session will teach you how to effectively recruit and hire individuals with as little disruption to your normal work routine as possible.

Key Learnings:

• You will know the critical factors involved in the hiring and selection process and your role as a manager.
• You will recognize the costs incurred by an organization when a wrong hiring decision is made.
• You will develop a fair and consistent interviewing process for selecting employees.
• You will be able to prepare better job advertisements.
• You will be able to develop a job analysis and position profile.
• You will be able to check references more effectively.
• You will understand how important an orientation program is and the key characteristics of the effective ones.

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 two-day 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.

Key Learnings:

• Apply the multifaceted aspects of talent management in their own organizations
• Describe the skills required to manage high potential candidates
• Recognize and foster talent within an organization
• Explain the principles of competency based management
• Use the language for talent management