Virtual Resources

April

• How to optimize virtual team meetings

  Date: Thursday, April 16th
  Time: 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
  Target audience: All employees
  Room: Online by AdobeConnect

  Overview

  Research indicates that 75% find their team members are more likely to be multitasking during virtual meetings and the effects of multitasking on organizations annually costs the global economy more than $450 billion in lost productivity.

  Content Covered During the Session

  The risk of multitasking and disengagement to the organization and team

  Strategies to implement before the meeting

  • Turn on the video
  • Use your meetings wisely
  • Create a graphical depiction of the team
  • Statement of achievement

  Strategies to implement during the meeting

  • Build a collaborative agenda
  • Build relationships and connect people
  • Provide a play-by-play commentary

  Strategies to implement at the end of the meeting

  • Provide a summary
  • Conduct an evaluation
  • Strategies to overcome meeting challenges including:
    • Lack of non-verbal cues
    • Multi-tasking/distractions
    • Gaining participation in meetings
    • Technology limitations
  • How will these strategies help you with your virtual team meetings?
  • Create a personal action plan

  At the end of the session the participants will be able to:

  • Identify nine techniques to improve your virtual meetings
  • Discuss challenges to conducting an effective virtual meeting and develop solutions to those challenges
  • Create a workplace environment in which remote team members feel equally engaged as their face-to-face counterparts
  • Build relationships from a distance
  • Manage feelings of disengagement and isolation among virtual team members
  • Use language to promote engagement

  Facilitator:

  Deb Fletcher, Virtual Teambuilders

  Register

• Goal-Setting conversations - SMARTER GOALS

  Date: Tuesday, April 21st
  Time:  1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
  Target audience:  All employees
  Room:  Online by Zoom

  A Goal is a Target…

  If you were learning archery but had no target, your progress would probably be slow; you have nothing to aim at. Having a goal is essential for high performance. It gives you a target to shoot at and immediate feedback on the accuracy of each shot.

  Overview 

  •  This interactive online 90-minute workshop covers the nitty-gritty of setting goals that draw you towards them as a magnet does. The secret lies not in will power, but in well-proven techniques that can help you become a high performer and that means achieving more for you….by you.
  • Identifying and creating balance/synergy between roles and goals

  What you will learn

  • Important ingredients of SMART & SMARTER goals
  • Developing an empowering goal statements
  • Creating a framework for goal setting and review                                     
  • Key components of effective goal setting
  • Techniques to improve your scheduling skills

  Facilitator:

  Diana Kawarsky, MA, CCP, President, The Soft Skills Group

  Register

• Working in and leading a virtual team

  Date:  Thursday, April 23rd
  Time:  10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
  Target audience:  All employees
  Room:  Online by AdobeConnect

  Overview 

  Getting this right is important to your business. Despite the increasing trend in virtual working, the majority of virtual teams will suffer some form of performance failure. According to the Gartner Group – 50% of virtual teams fail due to a lack of understanding of how to work virtually. More recent reports suggest that failure rates in virtual teams may actually be as high as 70%. Although technology enables organizations to bring diverse and dispersed team members together, teams that interact virtually have difficulty collaborating effectively, gaining a shared understanding of goals and tasks^, and/or achieving and maintaining the necessary levels of trust between team members.  Participants in this session will learn how to build a cohesive virtual team that best facilitates communication and collaboration amongst team members.

  What you will learn

  • MIT and Bell Lab study looking at how Distance impacts Communications
  • Review the 2 elements of what makes a virtual team successful and discuss how to incorporate these best practices
  • How do you build credibility when you virtual?
  • How do you show that you are reliable in a virtual environment?
  • How do you build trust when you are not face-to-face?
  • How to ensure your virtual team is provided timely information and kept in the loop
  • Techniques to manage from a distance
  • Case study
  • Managing Virtual Team Challenges including:
    • Building Relationships
    • Building and maintaining trust
    • Defining our common goal
  • How will these strategies help your virtual team be more successful?
  • Create a personal action plan

  Who Should Attend?

  This online session will benefit virtual team leaders and team members who work in and lead a virtual team.

  Facilitator:

  Deb Fletcher, Virtual Teambuilders

  register

• Managing me at home

  Date: Monday, April 27th
  Time:  9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.
  Target audience:  All employees
  Room:  Online by Zoom

  Overview 

  In this highly practical 2 hour webinar, you’ll learn self-management practices to help you stay focused, productive and engaged while working at home.

  • Intro: Lessons Learned. Examining the potential benefits and pitfalls of working at home.
  • Planning our work-at-home day. Setting ourselves up for success in a situation where we don’t have our normal work structures in place.
  • Kickstarting our work-at-home day. Getting the day started with a positive, productive state of mind.
  • Self Managing ourselves through the work-at-home day (where there’s no one else around and it’s easy to get distracted). Tips & best practices to help us stay focused, energized, “connected” and handle the unique distractions of working at home

  Facilitator:

  Doug Heidebrecht, Managing Me

  register

May

• Resilience: Thriving in Times of Uncertainty & Change

  Date: Tuesday, May 5th
  Time:  2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
  Target audience:  All employees
  Room:  Online

  Do any of the following statements resonate with you?

  • Is the constant state of change, uncertainty, and complexity making it hard for you to be resilient?
  • Do you find it hard to bounce back from even small setbacks?
  • Would you like strategies to boost your resilience?

  Why this workshop?

  Even before we had the Coronavirus, today’s climate was often referred to as “VUCA times” - an environment of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.  Developing a capacity for resilience, regardless of the situation, is not only essential but critical.  Thriving means being able to constantly bounce back from challenges and uncertainty as well as periods of adversity.

  Fortunately, resilience can be learned and developed. The brain can rewire itself for greater resilience and adaptability.

  What you will learn:

  • What resilience is and why it’s so critical – especially at this unprecedented time
  • How the brain can be rewired for greater resilience
  • Discover factors making you more resilient that are easily within your control
  • Access research-proven strategies to improve your resilience
  • Create a resilience action plan

  Facilitator:

  Wendy Woods, Watershed Training Solutions

  Register

• Change at Work - PROSCI & ADKAR in Action

  Date: Tuesday, May 12th
  Time:  1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
  Target audience:  All employees
  Room:  Online by Zoom

  Change is changing too…

  Consider that when a group changes, it is not only the organization that changes but rather the behaviours of individuals. New behaviour results and different professional or business outcomes are achieved. In other words, organizations don't change, only people within organizations

  Overview 

  This interactive online 90-minute workshop covers how you can better equip yourself to respond to the rate and pace of change changing, in addition to the specific change itself. It is a valuable resource as we all engage and manage change(s) every day.

  What you will learn

  • Create clear understandings of what choices, controls, and influences you have over change
  • Learn what to do when you successfully identify group development stages
  • Understand the value of the PROSCI approach
  • Apply ADKAR to your own on-the-job examples of change
  • Steps of effective change identification and overall management

  
  

  Facilitator:

  Diana Kawarsky, MA, CCP, President, The Soft Skills Group

  register

• Documenting Process and Procedures

  Dates:  May 14th, May 21st, and May 28th
  Time:  10 a.m. - 12 p.m.
  Target audience:  All employees
  Room:  Online by Zoom

  Overview

  This course provides industry-wide design standards for structuring information, integrating text and graphics effectively, and making their documents more readable. Participants learn to improve their documents while reducing total writing time. 

  Participants will be provided with the tools and conventions to write documentation on an organization’s processes and procedures that is readable, easy to navigate and complete.

  Learn how to:

  • Apply a standard writing process to documents on processes or procedures
  • Explain the role and nature of process and procedures documents
  • Use the principles of each phase of the writing process
  • Apply specific guidelines for determining requirements for compliance and analyzing the audience
  • Organize descriptive and procedural information
  • Practice the documentation process with hands-on examples
  • Revise your documents for grammar and style.

  Facilitator:

  • Stephen De Paul, PhD

  REGISTER