Workplace stress and longer hours have rarely been more prominent. Whether you are at the office or working from home, the constant emails, Zoom calls and other communications unfettered by time and distance can be overwhelming. All the more so if you’re working at home with children.
Purdue University’s online Master’s in Corporate Training and Communication is designed to teach professionals charged with communicating and leading training efforts in a variety of organizations and contexts.
Organization leaders need to think about communication and training strategies for addressing both employee well-being and the new remote or hybrid workplace structures that have become prominent with the pandemic, and that are likely to remain in place to a large extent in the future. Communication needs to be empathetic, build resilience, offer steps to manage stress, and provide employee resources for assistance. Moreover, leading in this new environment also means making provision for the training needs that must be filled to reach organization goals.
How leaders communicate and train their employees during the pandemic and after can have a deep effect on employee morale and the trajectory of an organization. With sudden displacement from “normal” environments, anxiety about the present and future tends to breed.
During such times of change, a leader’s words and actions can help calm nerves and ease the adjustment to new ways of working, while keeping the organization moving onward and upward.
“High performance organizations know that their employees are their most valuable asset. If employees are uninformed and unprepared to help meet organizational goals, then the organization is unprepared, too. Effective internal corporate communication, employee training initiatives, and information technologies that are strategically aligned, simply work better,” says Professor Bart Collins, director of the graduate program in Purdue’s Brian Lamb School of Communication.
The good news is that fundamental strategies of effective training and communication work. Purdue University’s 100% online Master’s in Corporate Training and Communication is designed for industry professionals seeking to benefit their organizations through enhanced training and communication focused on improving workplace effectiveness. Purdue’s faculty have industry experience that allows them to infuse practical knowledge into the curriculum through hands-on projects and use cases featuring real-life scenarios.
With the onset of the pandemic, leaders overnight had to write a new playbook and were immediately judged (sometimes unfairly) on how they communicated and implemented it. Now, the opportunity exists to apply lessons learned, along with a wealth of research and best practices, to building a foundation of organizational resilience that can transform potentially disruptive situations in positive ways, whether it is a pandemic, changes in the economy, changes in the marketplace, or other changes affecting an organization. Effective training and communications are integral to doing this.