Business Skills
Our business skills suite cover a wide range of topics from HR related courses such as bullying and harassment and managing sickness and absence to improving your management skills with effective delegation and managing meetings.
Our business skills courses are a great way to provide cost effective packages for new starters as well as staff who are aspiring too become managers. Staff who already hold management positions will also benefit from some of the courses provided enabling effective CPD for their roles.
Once a licence is bought, you can allocate it to the individual who can work through the course at their own pace so you wont have to worry about time away from the business or expensive T&S claims.
Our courses include:
Anti Harassment and Bullying: £30
Your Company should be committed to providing a working environment free from harassment and bullying and ensuring all staff are treated, and treat others, with dignity and respect. This course covers the commitments that will be laid out in your company's anti-harassment and bullying policy. It then explains the differences between harassment and bullying, the steps that can be taken if either of these occur in or out of work, and some case studies to illustrate the points covered throughout the course.
Conflict Resolution in the Workplace: £30
This course is aimed at supervisors and managers that want to develop effective conflict resolution methods. The course can be a great starting point for people new to their leadership role as well as more established managers that want to enhance their skills. This acts as a great introduction to the subject and covers the key concepts and theories relating to conflict management.
This course will start by making it very clear exactly what we mean by customer service, and why it’s so vital. It then goes into detail about the goals of great customer service, communication skills both verbal and non-verbal, discovering and understanding customer needs and much more.
Data Protection in the Workplace: £30
If you or your organisation handles personal information about individuals you have legal obligations to protect that information. The benefits of good data safety are numerous and include, good business practice, the protection of people’s rights and the protection of your organisations reputation. In recent years some companies and individuals have experienced serious legal consequences for data protection breaches and this highlights why it is so important to get it right. Training should be a vital part of any company’s data protection policy.
Developing Good Employee Relations: £30
Effective businesses encourage the development of positive relationships between managers and employees, as well as amongst co-workers. Establishing and maintaining good work relationships is the key to a positive workplace, and it doesn't have to take a lot of time. This course will define employee relations and cover the many benefits good relations can bring to an organisation.
Our Developing Teamwork course can be a great starting point for new managers or those that just want to enhance their management skills. This acts as a great introduction to the subject and covers the key concepts and theories around establishing and maintaining effective, resilient teams.
Disciplinary Procedures: £30
The aims of the disciplinary procedure are to provide a framework within which managers can work with employees to maintain satisfactory standards of conduct and to encourage improvement when necessary. This course covers the aims of the disciplinary procedure, penalties including investigations, allegations and suspensions, procedures for carrying out hearings, and appeals.
Effective Delegation: £30
Effective delegation is an essential skill to learn if you want to be an effective manager. After all, the best managers don’t strive to be super-heroes. Instead, they are exceptional at picking good people to do what they need to have done, and then letting them get on with it. However delegating effectively can be difficult. It means identifying the right tasks to delegate, overcoming barriers to delegation and taking the time to delegate properly so that everyone knows what they’re expected to do and by when.
Equality, Diversity and Discrimination: £30
We’ve all heard and used the words ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ before but what do they actually mean and how do they affect you as an employer or employee? Well if you take the words on their own they are actually quite different, equality is the state of being equal, especially in rights and opportunities. Diversity is the state of being different or varied. However these 2 things should not be seen as opposite to each other, after all people can be different but they still have the same rights. When it comes to places of work there is legislation in place to ensure that we all meet our responsibilities in relation to equality and diversity… And one way to make sure we meet these responsibilities is through training.
The GDPR is an incredibly important change to data privacy regulations so understanding its correct implementation is vital for all UK businesses and organisations, and particularly for staff who regularly deal with personal data. This online course is designed specially for those front line staff and provides a clear introduction to the main elements of the GDPR, including compliance and the consequences of non-compliance.
This course starts by introducing the basics of leadership and explores where the concept originated from. It then goes on to discuss various leadership theories, including situational leadership, contingency theories, transactional and transformational leadership and more. It then moves on to discuss developing teams including and team members by looking at the role leaders play in this. The final two modules cover the role communication plays in effective leadership and finishes off with a module about moving forward together to achieve a shared vision.
The course starts with some basic definitions and statistics that outline how important running meetings effectively can be. It examines factors that make meetings great, and some practical steps you can take to ensure everything runs smoothly and successful outcomes are achieved. It also covers some of the ways you can handle any problems that may arise. Finally, it looks at different decision-making approaches you can use and finishes off with some notes on keeping a learning log to help you learn and grow, ultimately becoming a more confident and effective participant or chairperson.
Managing Sickness and Absence: £30
Employee absence can be costly in terms of both lost time and money. It impacts businesses, managers, and colleagues in ways that range from them having to take on extra work or undertake additional training, to experiencing additional stress and a drop in morale. This course will help you to understand the different types of absence and Identify ways of measuring absence. It covers why you should complete return-to-work forms and how to conduct effective return-to-work meetings. The course finishes off by explaining the formal processes involved in managing absence and how to apply appropriate policies.
Negotiation: £30
Negotiation is a basic means of getting what you want from others. It’s a back and forth communication designed to reach an agreement when you and the other side have some interests that are shared and others that are opposed. This course covers the basics of what constitutes a negotiation, the key stages of a negotiation, skills you can apply to your negotiations and some practical advice so you can bring all of this together and become a more effective negotiator.
Objective Setting: £30
Setting clear and precise goals and objectives ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal, allowing for business and personal growth. Objectives clarify priorities and allow employees to allocate their time and resources more effectively. They also introduce a way of understanding how work will be measured and evaluated, thus enabling employees to evaluate their own performance, and make adjustments as necessary. This course aims to help you write effective objectives that deliver results. It covers the importance of goals and objectives and why we need them, the barriers to you achieving your objectives and how to overcome them, what SMART objectives are and how to write and identify them and concludes with some tips for successful objective setting.
Presentation Skills: £30
Giving a successful presentation can be one of the hardest parts of many people's jobs. Ultimately preparation will be the key to success when it comes to giving a presentation, but how do you make sure you are prepared enough? What about the structure? The content? How should you use visual aids? Being a successful presenter also involves understanding your audience, their expectations and needs. This course covers the common mistakes people make when preparing for and giving a presentation so you can avoid these, as well as going over good practice and providing some practical advice that you can put to good use the next time you have a big presentation to make.
Project Management: £30
The effective management of projects is an essential skill in many workplaces. Correct control of stages and different aspects of projects helps to increase the chances of projects being successful. This course covers some of the common project management methodologies, setting goals, and actually achieving them, identifying the need for a project to be started, using key project management tools and much more.
Sales Skills: £30
The course will start by providing an overview of the basic rules for sales people, along with the right mindset, self-assessment and the goals you’ll need in the short, medium and long term.
Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: £30
This course will start by defining sexual harassment and explaining how protection comes from both employment law and criminal law. You'll see from workplace statistics how widespread and serious the problem is, and how the management response to concerns raised is often poor or non-existent. It also addresses how allegations should be handled, explains the importance of having clear and robust policies and the role line managers tend to take when it comes to dealing with these situations. The course also coves investigation from the employer's perspective, the role of employment tribunals, and concludes with some case studies that will give further insight into what constitutes harassment and the outcome of cases where the businesses did not act appropriately to deal with this behaviour.
Stress Management: £30
The Health and Safety Executive states that ‘work related stress develops because a person is unable to cope with the demands being placed on them’. This can come from any aspect of their life but it often comes from demands placed on them at work. This course will cover an introduction to stress and why it’s a problem, some of the causes of stress and some ways to minimise the risk of stress.
The Principles of Performance Management: £30
In any organisation, the traditional model of strict command and control wastes a significant amount of time and money. Mutual trust, employee motivation and readiness to perform can easily be undermined. Performance management, on the other hand, offers a different, much more effective approach. In formal terms, performance management involves the achievement of performance targets through the effective management of people and the environment in which they operate. It’s about setting achievable goals for the organisation and targets for individuals and teams.
Time Management: £30
Good Time Management will improve and enhance the time spent in the workplace and can even go a long way to improving the quality of the work you produce. For most people however this is easier said than done. We’ve all experienced that feeling of having more work to do than we can possibly complete in the time we have. This can lead to increased stress… dissatisfaction… and demoralisation… This course can help, by introducing you to some of the theories and techniques of time management that can really make a difference.
Prices are on a per subscription basis and do not include VAT. For group purchasing discounts, please call 02380 627205 or email admin@echofourtraining.com with your requirements for a bespoke quotation.