Report writing is something that most people in any company will have to do at some point or another. Whether it is a manager writing a report on how his team are performing, to a sales person writing a pitch for a potential client, there are a wide range of skills and things that need to be looked at to do with report writing.

Report writing can be one of the hardest things to do, as a lot of people who are good at presentations and are articulate can find it hard to get down on paper what they would say to other people in the correct manner.

The main problem that many people have is that they find it very hard once they have got down everything they want to say onto paper to then turn it into a report. People find it hard to edit down a report that they have written so that it is as relevant and useful as possible. There are a lot of tips and tricks to do this well, but it can vary from person to person.

This is the sort of training where several different methods for creating the best possible report are given and the staff will have to mix and match until they find a method that works best for them.

Even if you have a full in house training team, it is still important to look outside of this team for ideas and new techniques, and possibly even to find people to provide supporting roles within you training exercises.

For example, having two actors in a training session helping to reenact common place scenarios can help to increase the quality of your training session immensely. However, having actors as full time members of staff, or even getting actors on a part time basis could be very expensive, added to which the part time actors may not have the experience to and understanding of skills training to provide you with the acting styles that you require. The main option, however, is to look at using a company who specialises in using trained actors in corporate training sessions to help improve them and provide greater value to the people attending the training sessions.

These actors can be used in a wide variety of ways, from simply adding extra dimensions to role-plays, to providing a fully acted out scenario which the attendees of the training session can direct and change. Actors can change even the toughest of training sessions into something that everyone can learn from in a fun and easy way.

As has been mentioned before, one of the most important parts of an effective meeting is the agenda. If there is no agenda, or the agenda has been badly planned and written, the meeting can be a complete waste of time. Creating an agenda for a meeting can be very simple, and there is no reason why they should not be used at all meetings.

Here are some basic tips to creating an agenda.

• Contact everyone who is going to the meeting and ask them to provide you with any points or topics that they wish to discuss in the meeting. Inform people that there is a deadline of two days before the meeting to get anything into the agenda.
• Take all the point and topics, and remove any that are not relevant to the meeting. Then remove any that are duplicates, and then prioritise them. You should always start meetings with the most important topics, as the beginning of the meeting is when everyone is at their freshest and most responsive - near the end of the meeting people just want to get out, and do not pay as much attention as they should.
• Hand out copies of the agenda before the meeting, so that people know exactly what is going to be discussed.

Making sure that everyone who runs meetings is trained in using agendas will increase the productivity of meetings no end.

Team building can be an important part of any departmental training - what is the point in improving staff skills if they are unable to function as a team? There are several objectives to any team building exercise, and it is possible to achieve some of these goals during standard training, not just on separate team building days. Areas that should be looked at include:

• How to create trust amongst team members
• Recognising an individuals strengths and skills, and how they can complement other peoples strengths and skills.
• Allowing differences and understanding how they can help a team.
• Making sure that everyone is tolerant of every other member of staff.
• Understand that mistakes can happen, and how the staff deal with them can greatly affect how they will function as a team.

In a team, people do not have to agree with each other. What they do have to do is communicate and discuss any issues so that they can come up with solutions and compromises that everyone is happy with. Remember, team building is not about rock climbing and abseiling, it is about the team being stronger than the individual members of staff.