Workplace Skills

HRD620 - Effective Meetings

This workshop is designed to increase awareness of one's role in a meeting and build the skills needed to run meetings successfully.

Key Points

• Manage dominant participants
• Control or prevent tangential conversation
• Improve the quality of decisions made at meetings
• Increase participant inclusion and engagement

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HRD600 - Building Relationships I: Emotional Intelligence

This workshop teaches methods to gain cooperation and understanding from coworkers, supervisors, instructors, students, and others. It also provides coping strategies for interpersonal conflicts and stressful situations. Participants have the opportunity to analyze their own communication and preferred work styles using the DiSC Profile, and they acquire strategies to adapt their styles to the four primary styles encountered at work.

Key Points

• Use body language and tone of voice to defuse the intensity of an interaction
• Respond to ultimatums and emotional situations
• Deal with unfair critisism
• Use techniques that promote cooperation
• Avoid defensiveness in daily interactions
• Negotiate reasonable expectations

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HRD610 - Building Relationships II: Intercultural Communication

This customized and highly interactive workshop provides the insight and skills needed to communicate and work effectively in a multicultural university environment.

Key Points

• Impact of culture in the workplace
• Identifying assumptions and avoiding stereotypes
• Behavior and communication patterns that promote harmonious relationships

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HRD640 - Time Management Secrets

This workshop proves that managing one's time and one's life doesn't require expensive leather schedulers and electronic calendars. It offers secrets behind planning, selecting priorities, setting goals, and organizing the work environment.

Key Points

• Recognize the importance of developing goals, setting objectives, and prioritizing work
• Identify and eliminate personal and environmental time wasters
• Create and analyze a time-usage log
• Create an efficient work environment
• Create a personal facilitation list
• Use a daily activities schedule

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HRD680 - Recruiting and Hiring Great Staff for Northwestern

Organized around Northwestern's seven-step recruitment process, this workshop provides great tools and resources for expediting the hiring process and making good hiring decisions.

Key Points

• Navigating Northwestern's recruitment and hiring process
• Opening and posting a position
• Advertising and networking
• Screening candidate resumes
• Preparing for and conducting interviews and phone screening
• Hiring and onboarding new employees

**$50 no-show/cancellation fee. CUFS number required to register.**
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HRD670 - Customer Service Techniques

This workshop teaches techniques for creating and maintaining positive work relationships with students, faculty, and staff.

Key Points

• Recognize and respond to unspoken customer expectations
• Develop processes that foster positive customer interactions
• Prepare form letters and customized documents that anticipate objections and prevent resentment
• Deal with irate clients in person and over the phone
• Improve questioning, listening, and nonverbal communication skills

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HRD510 - Better Business Writing and Editing

This course is for those who do a significant amount of writing or editing on the job and want to improve their performance by writing faster and more effectively. Focusing on the writing process from start to finish, it teaches techniques and tips for writing clear, result-oriented business letters, memos, e-mail messages, reports, and proposals. Participants will master the basics of good writing through both writing and editing exercises and discussion. Please bring three samples of your own writing so you can practice the techniques you learn in class.

Key Points

• Overcome writer's block and get started quickly
• Plan and organize your information before starting to write
• Choose the appropriate tone and style for your audience
• Know why you are writing and get to the point right away
• Write clear and effective opening and closing paragraphs
• Complete a "working" first draft and analyze it by reviewing eight important criteria including readability and organization
• Revise and edit for clarity and cohesiveness
• Correct common style problems including wordiness and redundancies
• Vary sentence length and sentence structure to create reader interest
• Use your document design to emphasize your main ideas and increase readability
• Proofread for error-free copy

**This two-part workshop meets once a week over two consecutive weeks; please plan to attend on all two dates.**

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HRD500 - Better Business Grammar and Punctuation

Their tone and content may be serious, but letters, memos, e-mail messages, proposals, and reports with grammatical or punctuation errors won't be taken seriously. In this three-part workshops, participants learn how to avoid embarrassing mistakes in everyday business correspondence by getting a comprehensive, confidence-building review of the basic rules of grammar, capitalization, word usage, sentence structure, and punctuation.

Key Points

• Identify and use the eight parts of speech correctly
• Write clear, complete sentences, fix sentence fragments and run-on sentences
• Spot and correct errors of agreement, consistency problems and pronoun mistakes, and misplaced or dangling modifiers
• Change passive voice to active voice
• Use that/which, who/whom appropriately
• Spot and correct missing or misplaced periods, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, apostrophes, hyphens, dashes
• Use colons, semicolons, parentheses, and ellipses correctly

**This three-part workshop meets once a week over three consecutive weeks; please plan to attend on all three dates.**

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HRD530 - Writing for Results: Effective Letters, Memos, and E-mail Messages

At the least, poorly written letters, memos, and e-mail message waste time and cause miscommunication. At worst, they are not read at all. This workshop will teach participants to organize and write strong, action-oriented business correspondence to get the reader's attention and the desired results.

Key Points

• Analyze your audience and define your purpose
• Effectively organize your ideas and information
• Choose the appropriate tone and style
• Write strong opening and closing paragraphs
• Reduce rambling and get to the point right away
• Use format and type to emphasize your main ideas
• Revise and edit for overall organization and coherence

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HRD520 - Writing Difficult Messages

Rejecting an applicant, denying a request, issuing an apology, or responding to a complaint can be delicate. A masterfully written letter or memo can build goodwill or, at the very least, minimize negative feelings. This workshop will teach successful ways to approach difficult correspondence and communicate bad news tactfully.

Key Points

• Decide what and how much to say
• Choose the appropriate tone and style
• Soften a negative message but get the point across
• Say no and still maintain goodwill
• Choose when and how to deliver the message
• Write five different types of difficult messages

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HRD650 - Project Management Essentials

This workshop helps both new and experienced project managers find ways to shorten timelines. Participants learn the concepts and methods to apply when setting project goals, prioritizing work, and measuring progress.

Key Points

• Identify the project path
• Schedule tasks and activities
• Estimate and allocate resources
• Control project progress
• Conduct a post-project review

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HRD630 - Effective Presentation Skills

Participants become aware of their own presentation style and get feedback and tools to improve skills.

Key Points

• Recognize behaviors that distract the audience
• Reduce nervousness through a few key skills
• Increase confidence and credibility
• Receive personalized feedback for each presentation

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HRD660 - Transform Stress (formerly Power to Change Performance through Inner Quality Management®)

When we are aware of and able to regulate our emotions, we can react to "stress and change" from a state of balance, positively affecting performance and health. Effective performance requires the ability to manage oneself emotionally in order to stay effective. Participants in this workshop will learn how to improve self-management skills by using scientifically validated tools and technology from the Institute of HeartMath®. Each participant will receive a program workbook, "Transforming Stress" book, and Quiet Joy CD.

Key Points

• Increase mental focus, acuity, and creativity
• Become more flexible and resilient in the face of change
• Stay motivated in spite of people or events
• Manage relationships more effectively
• Reduce or prevent stress and anxiety
• Support health and well-being

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HRD690 - ADA Accommodations: Step by Step Guidance for Supervisors and Managers

This interactive workshop instructs supervisors and managers on the basic requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and its impact on the workplace.

Key Points

• Understand the definition of a disability
• Identify employees who are protected
• Learn about employer requirements, University policy and procedures
• Determine appropriate responses to performance deficiences that may be linked to a disability
• Determine appropriate responses to requests for accommodations

**$50 no-show/cancellation fee. CUFS number required to register.**
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For more information, please contact Human Resource Development at training@northwestern.edu or 847-467-5081.