5 Must Have Training Courses for your Team

The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. — Henry Ford, Founder, Ford Motor Company

 Investing in employee development is investing in your business's success. Ongoing employee training creates an adaptive, flexible workplace that can quickly respond to changes. 

The demand for training has never been higher. Employees want training that satisfies their needs as professionals for your workplace and to keep their skills current. This article lists the top five training programs we think every employee should take to be successful at work and in their personal lives.

 1. Communication

There are hundreds of courses in communication offered, including our recommendation-ColourSpectrums. ColourSpectrums provides insight into how employees want to be communicated and how to adjust their communication style to work more effectively with others. The advanced courses can give the managers additional information on supervising and motivating the different types of communicators. Ineffective communication leads to negative work environments, which can affect your company's bottom line. Your employees should understand the basics of good communication in face-to-face meetings, email, text or Zoom meetings.

 2. Time Management

“Based on over a half-century of cognitive science and more recent studies on multitasking, we know that multitaskers do less and miss information. It takes time (an average of 15 minutes) to re-orient to a primary task after a distraction such as an email. Efficiency can drop by as much as 40%. Long-term memory suffers and creativity — a skill associated with keeping in mind multiple, less common, associations — is reduced.” (Harvard Business Review, December 2010). For every organization, time is a valuable but limited resource. It is a key to success, yet many employees lack the skillset required to manage their time effectively. This results in stress, missed deadlines, and poor work quality. Time management training provides techniques and tools that will help your employees stay organized, focused, and be more productive every day.

 3. Mental Health First Aid:

“Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training course was developed to help people provide initial support to someone who may be developing a mental health problem or experiencing a mental health crisis. MHFA teaches mental health first aid skills. The course does not train people to be therapists, counselors, or mental health professionals. The philosophy behind MHFA is that mental health crisis, such as suicidal and self-harming actions, may be avoided through early intervention. If a crisis does arise, then members of the public can take action that may reduce the harm that could result.” (CMHA Edmonton)

Mental Health falls into the illnesses that are covered under WCB. Providing Mental Health First Aid training to Supervisors and Managers will help to lessen the number of staff who need to access WCB for mental illness. The key is to see it early.

4. Harassment Training

It’s 2022 and just this morning I had a phone call about a 35 year old male employee taking photos of his 16 year old female co-worker from behind-without her consent. We’d like to think out employees know better, but they don’t. Your employees today will become your leaders tomorrow, so we need to break the cycle of workplace harassment. It isn’t enough to have the policy, you need to also train your staff, test their knowledge and get them to sign-off on it.

5. Diversity Training

There are 87 different nationalities represented in Grande Prairie, making our workplaces more diverse than ever. Businesses need their teams to understand diversity issues and have better social awareness and understanding of the role diversity plays in growing a business. Diversity training will enhance employee knowledge, provide tools to recognize diversity-related issues and increase their acceptance of diversity in the workplace.