Communication Skills Training Hones Your Team’s Talents

The success of any organization relies on the communication skills of its managers and associates. Nevertheless, many business schools treat their students’ ability to write and present effectively as “soft skills”. Associates with BBAs or even MBAs do not necessarily possess the public speaking or professional writing skills that they need to drive business organizations.

Many people have problems with more than just common grammar mistakes or professional etiquette. They struggle to write coherently, their presentations are disorganized, and they do not know how to express themselves in meetings. A quick grammar guide cannot fix core communications issues like these. If your team is under performing because they lack core communication skills, training workshops can help. As a manager or executive, you should begin by identifying your organization’s weaknesses and your employee’s frustrations. Business communication training facilitators help your organization reduce wasted time and close more sales. They give your analyst’s and associate’s strategies for delivering information and ideas, meaning your managers and executes spend more time making decisions and less time puzzling over confusing sentences.

Presentation Skills Training – Your organization can improve client-facing and executive-facing presentations by investing in a workshop. Disorganized presenters persuade fewer clients and often waste the time of your C-suite. Many organizations spend too much time on executive presentations that fail to concisely and effectively inform decision makers. Take one case study offered by communication training firm Wavelength. The organization’s ethics department consistently delivered too much detail to the Behavioral Standards Committee, and struggled to answer questions informatively. Meanwhile, their written reports were incoherent, lengthy, and full of jargon. Course facilitators combined both a presentation and writing skills workshop to address the problems. Participants learned how to organize their message and create presentations that were informative and stayed within time constraints.

Business Writing Workshops–Professionals can seriously jeopardize their organization’s client relationships with the wrong email and damage their own reputations. However, even individuals with a strong knowledge of tone and etiquette benefit from communication skills training courses that focus on email. The average office employee spends up to a third of her day reading, organizing, and responding to emails. A Pew Research study found that 61% of people who were online for their jobs report email as a “very important tool” at their workplace, higher than either the Internet itself or phones (smartphones and landlines combined). Participants in workshops such as those offered by Wavelength learn when email is the best tool to use, how to write clear messages that are brief and to-the-point, and how to best use subject lines.

Improve Your Meeting Culture –Do your meetings frequently run too long, lose attendees’ attention, or end without clear results? Meetings are one of the most common culprits for wasted time at the office, but they can be effective tools for solving problems and holding team members accountable. The most effective meetings last 30 minutes or less and engage all attendees. Take a business meeting training course as a team, including team leaders, in order to make the most of your Monday morning meetings.