training
A series of skill-building modules designed to make a real difference for teams and individuals.
Each module offers a safe space to learn and practise a set of tools aimed at supporting the most common workplace challenges.
Our growing list of training modules includes:
- Making Email Work For You
- Prioritising the Right Things
- Setting Boundaries / Saying No
- Clear Delegation
- Halve it
- Dealing with Burnout
- Creating the Right Mindset
- Supporting Effective Meetings
- Goodbye Perfect
- Negotiating Change
- Managing Up
- Creative Breakthrough
- Writers Retreat
- Pause and Breathe
- How to speak with confidence
Read below for more information on each one, and get in touch here to book modules for your team.
Making Email Work For You
For: Team-alignment, Managing Change, Team-building, Resilience Building
Learn how to get your email inbox to zero, and an effective way to save time, prioritise effectively and reduce anxiety. You’ll apply the tools as part of the lesson and leave ready to use the approach and adapt it to suit your own way of working.
This session is also good for helping teams agree protocols for shared inboxes and communication channels.
This facilitated session works alongside the Working Smarter elearning programme modules – Creating the Space for Important Work and Make Email Work For You.
Prioritising the Right Things and Getting Clear On What Everyone Is Doing
For: Team-alignment, Managing Change, Team-building, Resilience Building
This practical webinar helps teams get really clear on what everyone is working on and which activities to prioritise. Together you’ll explore a range of tools including a comprehensive project-mapping exercise which plots all your current activity. This provides clarity around who is doing what, revealing gaps and duplication, helping the team to calibrate their efforts and agree on priorities.
Team members leave feeling clearer, and more in control of their own work and how that fits in with others, with a plan for the next few weeks in their calendar.
This facilitated session works alongside the Working Smarter elearning programme module Prioritising the Right Things.
Setting Boundaries and Saying No
For: Team-alignment, Managing Change, Team-building, Resilience Building
As a manager, getting the balance right between supporting colleagues and protecting space for important and strategic work can be really hard. With so much that needs doing, it can feel like the only option is to work longer and harder just to keep things going.
This practical webinar gives you tools, ideas and space to practise ways to set boundaries and say no without damaging relationships or reputation. You’ll leave confident, determined and equipped to push back and make space for yourself and your most important work
This facilitated session works alongside the Working Smarter elearning programme module Creating Space for Important Work.
Clear Delegation Conversations
For: Wellbeing, Team-alignment, Managing Change, Resilience Building
This practical webinar helps you understand why even crystal clear instructions can be misinterpreted, misunderstood or misheard.
Learn how to delegate better to consistently get the right results. Help your teams get clear on expectations, context and implications so that they can own their projects and make the right decisions for themselves.
Halve it
For: Wellbeing, Team-alignment, Behaviour Change, Resilience Building
Discover how to audit the time you spend on meetings and learn how you can reduce their length and number. Stop doing work that doesn’t need to be done, streamline processes that don’t add value, and use Teams more effectively.
A hands-on, decisive workshop that gives permission and space to launch a series of experiments designed to halve the time lost to unproductive work.
Dealing with Burnout - how to spot it and protect yourself
For: Team-alignment, Managing Change, Team-building, Resilience Building
Explore the causes of burnout and design ways you can protect yourself, and your team, from it. For this reason, this is a practical session taught in small groups to help you identify the risks you are exposed to right now, and the steps you can take to keep yourself well, happy and effective in your work and home life.
Creating the Right Mindset
For: Resilience Building, Managing Change, Team Motivation.
Discover a set of tools teams can use to support good communication and a positive mindset.
Learn how Stephen Covey’s Circles of Influence model can address concerns that may be weighing on your team, creating an environment where colleagues coach each other towards optimal solutions. The model is rooted in the concept that you have more power than you think.
Teams can use this session to focus on any area of concern, to reduce anxiety and identify steps towards positive outcomes.
This facilitated session works alongside the Working Smarter elearning programme modules – Creating the Right Mindset.
Creative Breakthrough
For: Problem Solving, Reducing Anxiety, Peer Support
Discover different ways to tackle difficult problems. Working with your peers you will take a creative approach using collage. This is a surprisingly effective tool for problem solving, innovating and getting a fresh perspective, whilst also being a calming, enjoyable, and easily accessible creative activity. Taking your challenges into images and working with your hands opens up new pathways. Working in support of your colleagues builds trust and empathy and establishes a supportive environment.
Good for individuals and teams.
‘brilliantly structured, the atmosphere was excellent, team working and support from colleagues was great. I loved the breathing and warm up exercises. It was so productive!’
Participant from Nottingham University Business School
Goodbye Perfect
For: Capacity Building, Resilience Building, Imposter Syndrome, Behaviour Change
Discover how to adjust your mindset if you have a tendency towards perfectionism and procrastination. The course introduces you to simple growth mindset techniques by applying an agile methodology to your day-to-day work, increasing your resilience to feedback and seeing the benefits of faster innovation as a result.
You will learn:
- How to make progress on complex tasks
- Why small experiments are faster and safer
- How to tackle procrastination and get things done
Negotiating Change
For: Capacity Building, Resilience Building, Team-alignment, Team-building, Managing Change
Discover a toolkit of resources that enable people to engage with change more easily. You will be introduced to a powerful framework that supports change including tools to aid communication, help your team feel safer and empowered to shape change. You will explore good practice in tracking progress, resolving problems as they arise and reviewing for continuous improvement.
This session includes space to reflect on your own change context.
Supporting Effective Meetings
For: Capacity Building, Resilience Building, Imposter Syndrome
Learn practical techniques for ensuring the meetings you support achieve successful outcomes. This includes how to support your meeting chair by doing the basics well, including: agenda preparation, capturing meeting notes to support effective outcomes, following through on agreed actions, and avoiding bottlenecks.
Managing Up
For: Capacity Building, Resilience Building, Imposter Syndrome
An introduction to strategies for more productive outcomes with senior stakeholders where time is of the essence, and differences in personalities and working preferences are at play.
You will explore:
- Your own preferences and how you like to be approached with new tasks
- Techniques for assessing the working preferences of your stakeholders and how you might adapt your approach
Writers' Retreat
For: Generating written research outputs, Building skills to managing the writing process, Building peer support
Length: from one to several days.
Writers Retreats are for anyone who struggles to find time to write, or make the most of the time they have.
The retreat gives you the time to do the important work that gets you published, noticed and establishes you in your field of endeavour. The work you really want to make time for, but somehow don’t.
This retreat brings together researchers so that they can write as effectively as possible in an atmosphere, not just conducive to writing, but also for peer to peer connection.
Pause and Breathe
For: Anxiety and overwhelm reduction, wellbeing and confidence
Length: 20 minutes x 6 weeks
A weekly 20 minute pause from the busyness, pressures and demands of work giving you an opportunity to reset to a position of calm, balance and peace.
Using a few, simple, self-care and stress relief techniques ‘Pause & Breathe’ supports staff to ease anxiety, reduce stress, and restore calm, balance, inner peace and energy.
Each session involves light physical movement, breathing and mindfulness exercises that can be done at or away from your desk. Sessions are flexible and can be provided as drop-ins or accessed by individual teams, in person or online.
Photo by James Barrick
How to speak with confidence
Have you ever felt too intimidated to make a point or ask a question in a meeting? Does the thought of leading a presentation fill you with fear?
This practical workshop will show you simple tools and techniques you can use to feel less nervous and express yourself with confidence.
You’ll explore ways to connect with your audience, and discover how to give engaging presentations. You’ll learn ways to prepare and rehearse, and discover strategies to feel courageous to say what you really mean.
This is for:
- Anyone who is nervous about speaking in meetings
- Anyone who would like to feel more confident about presenting in public