An employee workshop that can help almost any employee is one on how to write effectively. Many forms of contact by employees in today’s workplace, whether internally or externally, are by written word. Whether it is a letter, report or email, it is important that the person writing it knows how to write in a way that is understood by everyone reading it. All to often, with the immediacy of email, and other factors, the most important part of the writing is forgotten - how to do it effectively. There is no point in writing a letter that no one understands, or writing a report that does not inform the way it should. Employees need to be shown how writing effectively can help to make their jobs easier and simpler.

Different forms of written contact have slightly different styles to be effective. For example, email is seen as a more informal way of communication than by letter. This means that the writing style is different. However, the principles to writing effectively remain the same:

• People need to understand what makes an effective letter or email.
• Make sure that preparation for the letter/ email is done fully before starting to write it.
• Realise that tone and personality can and do come out in writing, and that it is important to make sure that they convey the right ones.
• Communicate the message so that the reader can understand it easily.

Writing effectively is the sort of training that everyone in a company can benefit from. It can help with clarifying internal communications, while also improving client relationships.

Teamwork is something that is required for companies to do well. However, it is also something that can fall by the wayside on occasion, with office politics, popularity and other such workplace occurrences that cause a lot of disruption to the ability of staff to cooperate and work together as efficiently as possible.

However, can people be trained to use teamwork to achieve the companies goals? The answer is yes. There are a wide range of techniques and practices that can be used and taught to help foster teamwork within a group of staff. One such example is the use of employee workshops for the entire team to help improve their effectiveness and communication skills.

The employee workshop can look at helping staff to understand what makes a successful team and by association what makes a better team player, and how they can work towards this. They can examine all roles within the team, and try and gain an understanding of individual peoples strengths and weaknesses within the team, and how they fit into the team as well. One of the most important thing to do is to get the team to look at what barriers to communication exist, and if any changes need to be made there. The way in which group decisions are made is also something that needs to be looked at, to see if any inefficiencies can be removed.

If there is a group of people who are meant to be working in a team but are instead lacking any sort of teamworkability and are not functioning as efficiently as possible, it is important to find the root cause of this and then provide training to help fix the issue.

Using role play is an accepted and very useful form of staff training, for all levels, from the simplest of employee workshops, to three day management training courses. The most important thing is to make sure that all role play scenarios are relevant to the current are of training. The people who are involved in the role plays must relate to the scenarios, and feel that they can take what they have learnt from the the role play and put it straight into their own work. There are a great many different possible role plays for any particular area of training, so picking the ones that will help the most can be quite tricky. There are several steps you can take to make sure that choose the most important and relevant scenarios though.

The main step is to research into the people you are organising training for. You need to know what they have to deal with on a daily basis and where any issues may lie. While you can get a lot of this information from their managers, it is important to remember that the managers may not know all of their staff issues, so it is best to find out what scenarios staff have to deal with by watching them at work. The more of a feel you get for the issues that the staff have to deal with, the better the training will be.

You should also pay close attention the feed back from previous training sessions. Obviously if this is anew training session, then there will not be any feed back. However, in all other cases you must ensue that you gain feedback from the people taking part in the role playing exercises, so that you are able to gage how helpful each of the role plays was. When you know what works, you can concentrate on the role plays that are not helping the staff in their training as required.

Don’t be afraid to change role plays if they are not working. If the role play is not working, not only will you not be helping the staff in their training, you will also be putting them off these sort of training exercises and damaging their future training.

Hiring a training company to help with sales training or management training is an important step to make if you are dedicated to providing the best possible training to the people in your company. There are several criteria that you should look at that to help you to choose the best fit training company to your own company. Remember, you will be working very closely with them, so you must make sure the training company that you do choose fits in with your own company ethos. The questions you should ask include:

• Does the training company understand the culture of your business, and will they be able to shape training programs so that they fit withing these criteria?
• Will the training that will be delivered provide the required experience to your staff?
• Can you trust the training company to maintain their standards as long as we use them?
• Will the training company become part of our team, yet also manage to stay far enough removed that they can look at our company through fresh eyes?
• Will the training keep the interest of everyone involved and ensure that everyone takes as much as possible from the training?

Obviously every training company that you approach will be different, but it is important to make sure that you feel that the training company that you choose is able to provide everything that is required and helps to implement training schemes that will provide benefits for your company long into the future.

Employee workshops can be a very useful way of training staff. However, they can also be seen as a waste of time by the same staff that they are meant to help. This is usually down to poor planning and a misunderstanding by staff of what the workshop is meant to provide. It is essential that the people attending the workshop understand how the workshop can help them, and that they people fully involved int he workshop. there is nothing worse than a workshop where a lot of hard work has been put in by the organisers, only for those attending to be very unenthusiastic and lethargic towards the whole process.

There are several ways that you can get attendees of employee workshops to feel more involved. These include:

• Using actors to help demonstrate parts of the workshop
• Use relevant case studies and issues that the attendees deal with on a regular basis.
• Make sure that questions are posed to the attendees throughout the workshop, making sure that they are relevant and that answers are expanded upon by other people in the workshop.

Once you have the interest of the people in the workshop, you must make sure that you do not lose that interest. How you do this is up to you, but it is essential that you have the entire workshop planned - if you start to falter at any point, people will lose interest very quickly. Keep that attention!

One of the problems faced when running an employee workshop is getting the employees involved in role plays and other such interactive techniques. There always seems to be some sort of stigma attached to these sort of exercises - no matter how the employee workshop is run, as soon as you mention role play, people start to become anxious and worried about what might happen. This is not due to any lack of perceived value in the role play (indeed, most people will admit that role play helps them), but rather through the fear of a possibility of humiliation.

So how can this fear be overcome? The answer is quite a simple one really - use actors in place of employees. This allows employees to see what is happening and understand what is required, and allow them to become enthusiastic and want to become involved without any perceived pressure. It allows people’s natural enthusiasm to get out, without making them feel conspicuous or embarrassed. Quite often, you will find that employees become a lot more involved if there are actors to start the role plays off, than if there were just other people that they work with involved.

Using actors may seem like an elaborate solution to getting people more involved in employee workshops, but it works better than any other solution available, and must be considered when planning workshops involving roleplays.