Category Archives: Classroom

How to Turn Your Managers into Leaders

‘Management is doing things right; Leadership is doing the right things.’ – Peter Drucker
The line between managers and leaders is very thin. Yet turning your managers into leaders is no easy feat. Good leaders do more than just managing tasks. They take ownership and inspire others to work toward a common goal.

But here’s the good news! It is possible to turn your managers into leaders through training. If you are planning to train your managers into leaders, the first step is to identify the traits that make a good leader different from the average manager. So before you rent training room or rent classroom for training your managers, read here a few tips on how to provide leadership training to your managers.

1. Help them improve their communication skills

Communication forms the basis of all human activity and endeavor. Make sure your training program focuses on improving the communication skills of your managers. The instructor or mentor must engage them with questions and resolve any queries arising therefrom. They may also engage your managers in group learning as this will help improve their inter-personal communication.

2. Choose the right mentor

Training your managers is different than training your employees. Unlike your new hires, your managers would probably be reluctant to learn from anyone. So choosing the right mentors is crucial. Look for industry experts or highly experienced mentors. Also, make sure the mentor is easily approachable and has a friendly attitude. Informal communication should be spread across formal spaces. This will not only create a wholesome environment but make the sessions interesting.

3. Give feedback

Teaching and instruction, if done at optimum, can only be gauged through feedback.
Feedback not only inspires the learners but also points to the direction where they may tread for better results. Feedback must have empathy, consideration and kindness.

Finally, create a lively, learning environment. You may want to use social games and other group driven fun-filled activities to make learning more fun and enjoyable.

3 More Tips to Overcome the Language Barrier in Meetings

After familiarizing yourself with the language of your attendees and having done the necessary preparation, focus on what needs to be done inside your training room rental. Being proactive and providing information through different channels, responding to queries and cooperating are crucial to addressing the language barrier in meetings. Here are three more tips on how to do it.

1. Avoid using idioms or jargon

If you are a foreigner participating in a meeting in Singapore, it is advisable to avoid using idioms and slangs. Local attendees may not understand the meaning of those phrases that are native to your own culture. For instance, it’s common to use baseball terms in business communication in the U.S. However, if you use those terms in Singapore, it might lead to confusion and misinterpretation. Also avoid using jargon, and be as precise as possible. If you’re using abbreviations, explain what they mean in parentheses on the whiteboard/projector screen.

2. Repeat and confirm

Remember that you have a potential language barrier with your audience, so repetition is the key to ensure everyone is on the same page. Spell out a concept clearly, say the key terms out aloud, and have them flashed on the screen— to make sure your attendees don’t miss out on anything.

Also, it’s easy to assume the listeners understood everything you said. As an exercise, ask individual members to demonstrate what they grasped. Another good idea would be to print your key pointers and handout copies of the key notes to your audience. When you rent classroom or meeting room, make sure they provide a photocopier at the venue.

3. Have patience

Overcoming language problems in meetings doesn’t involve hacks or quick-fixes — it’s a continuous process that takes both partners to work together. Using long-terms tools like e-mail communication, marketing campaigns, newsletters and exercises, quizzes/surveys and discussions during meetings helps to gradually chip away the language barrier.

3 KPIs for Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Event

Meetings and events are a huge investment for your company. Whether you organize product launch meetings, employee training sessions or seminars, you probably have to rent training room, book a caterer, send out invites and start posting about the event on social media. That’s a lot of work involving huge investments in terms of money, time and efforts. No wonder companies in Singapore want to make sure they get a high return on the investment. But how will you measure the effectiveness of your meetings. Here are some the key performance indicators (KPIs) to look at.

1. The amount of wasted time

Despite being hard-working, around 20% Singaporean professionals use up a major part of their event time unproductively. This wastage often happens due to unfamiliarity with technology, not knowing how to set up equipment or tools, not having a set agenda, and the not starting the event on time. So it’s important that you keep a track of how much time you’re actually using on your meetings and events.

2. Planned time versus spent time

You might have assigned a specific duration for each task, but it doesn’t mean anything until your staffers can meet that target. Compare your allocated time with the time you actually spent on individual segments to arrive at hard numbers. This will also be useful to alter your schedule accordingly in the future and to downsize certain segments and expand others that require more attention. Prevent unnecessary stalling or hang-ups by looking for classroom rental service that offers facilities like a good Wi-Fi connection, projectors, and easy access to washrooms and photocopying services.

3. Attendance

Start by taking a look at your invitee list. How many people are actually turning up? The difference between the number of invitees and attendees is a straightforward indicator of the effectiveness of your event. If the difference is disturbing, maybe you rented the wrong training room the last time, the trainer wasn’t up to the mark, or you need a complete overhaul in the way you plan and execute your events.

3 More Tips to Improve Employee Engagement

Hiring great talent is only the first step. In order to leverage your talent pool for the growth of your company, you need a clear vision and mission. If you fail to make your employees see the big picture of your company, they’ll feel disengaged at work. Your job as a manager or employer is to make every task meaningful to them. But how can you do that in practice to improve your employee engagement? Well, there are many ways – from booking training room rental to offering incentives for great work. Here are two more tips to make your employees more engaged at work.

1. Encourage them to participate in volunteer work

People feel happy and satisfied when they can help others. Your employees are no different. If you can inspire them to participate in volunteer work as a team, it’ll definitely help improve their level of work satisfaction. Think about what your company can do for the underprivileged in your community. When your employees take part in charitable programs, they find meaning to their work and are more likely to come to work more satisfied.

2. Ask for feedback

When you ask someone for feedback, it makes them feel that their opinion matters. What a great way to improve employee engagement, without having to spend a dime.

3. Mentor them

It’s one thing to perform well; it’s another to help others perform well. Your job as a manager or boss is not just to sell more, but mentor others in your team to learn how to sell more. That’s exactly where most managers fail. They might be great performers but way too bad mentors. If required, you can rent classroom and organize short training sessions for your employees. That way, you can win the trust of your employees and make them feel valued and growing at work.

4 More Tips to Keep Your Audience Engaged

Audience engagement is no easy feat. Even good speakers sometimes fail to impress their audience. It’s not always your fault though. Maybe the training room is not well-equipped with all the necessary facilities. So first things first, make sure you book the right training room rental or classroom rental for your training session.

Once the basic facilities are squared away, now the next important thing is the subject of your speech. The next crucial thing is your speaking style. A lot of things go into making a training program successful. Here are some more tips to keep your audience engaged.

1. Make it a two-way communication

Even though you’ll do most of the talking, don’t make it sound like a one way communication. Wherever possible ask questions and invite feedback. Try to make it an interactive session, so your audience can participate in the learning process and remain engaged.

2. Pause after every 10 minutes

Studies show that humans cannot listen to a speech effectively for more than 10 minutes at once. So it would be a good idea to pause after every 10 minutes. At each break, you can give some activities to your attendees. That way, you’ll help them refresh their mind and allows them to reflect on what they learned so far.

3. Be specific and concise

There’s no point stretching your discussion for hours when you can present the information much faster. Granted, you need to include stories and narratives in your speech to make it sound more interesting, but don’t stretch it unnecessarily.

4. Don’t simply read your slides

Slides are important for your presentation but don’t depend too much on them. Just because you’ve collected ample information doesn’t mean you’ve to share them all. Instead, focus on eliminating unimportant slides and talk freely without always having to look back and forth between slides and audience.

Top 3 Tips for Training Your New Hires

You hired a few “good” talents, but now you’ve works to do. You need to train them, make them familiar with your organizational culture, work process, tools and technology.

Training your new employees could be overwhelming. You may feel like you’ve a lot to share, so much so that you are confused where to start. But don’t worry! If you are planning to rent training room but still not sure how to train your new hires, here are some useful tips.

1. Develop self-learning materials
Before you rent classroom or even start the recruiting process, focus on developing self-learning content for your would-be employees. Start by writing a thorough job description and then create FAQs and training materials. That way, you can help your new hires to figure out most of the steps on their own. This saves your time on training and allows your employees to learn conveniently at their own pace.

2. Assign an internal mentor
Self-learning content is a good strategy, but your new hires may still need in-person help. They need a go-to person for any query or help. You can hire an experienced trainer for the job, but far too effective would be choosing a trainer from within your company. For instance, senior team members can train juniors or new hires. It’s a dual-purpose strategy. On the one hand, it helps your employees to learn from insiders who know the system inside out. On the other hand, when you assign your senior employees as trainers, they feel valued.

3. Make the training enjoyable
Just because it is a training program doesn’t mean it should be boring. Make the program enjoyable for your new hires through gaming and fun activities. Take short breaks and allow your employees to socialize and interact with each other. The more enjoyable your training programs, the more engaging they are.

7 Considerations When Creating Your Training Program

In today’s dynamic business environment, you need to update your tools and strategies more frequently than ever before. This also means that you need to train your employees more frequently.

But just booking training room rental or classroom rental for your training program isn’t enough. Before you do that, you should develop an effective training program. To that end, here are a few important things to consider.

1. Identify your goals – The first thing is to identify what you are trying to achieve with your training program. This will give you direction to your options as you build your training program.

2. Know your target audience – The next step is to define your target audience. For instance, one program could target only senior managers, while another can target blue color workers.

3. Choose topics – Once you know your goals and your target audience, now you need to identify topics related to them. Good topics would align with your organization’s goal and address the needs of your target attendees.

4. Determine a system for giving feedback – You need to employ different feedback systems for different employees. For instance, one feedback system may have simple “multiple choice” question answers, while another may ask for more detailed feedback and comments.

5. Identify the availability of attendees – When deciding the length of the program, you’ll need to know how many days, hours your particles are available for the training session. Also, find out how many sessions you might require to achieve your training goals.

6. Decide the mode of training – Corporate training programs can be conducted online or in-person. Each mode of training has its own pros and cons. You need to decide the right mode for the right type of training.

7. Consider follow-up activities – For your training program to be effective, it should have follow-up activities for the participants. Whatever your employees have learned from the training program, they should be able to practice those immediately in real-world environments.

How to Build Your Event Community

People attend events to learn and grow, but great events give them more! If you think event hosting is all about booking training room rental and hiring a celebrity speaker, think again.

What sets a great event apart from an ordinary one isn’t the knowledge exchange. It isn’t the quality of your food catering or classroom rental either. If you want people to wait for your event, aim for building a community. Here are some tips on how to build your event community.

1. Have a powerful vision

Think of your event as a tool to reach a bigger goal. You should have a vision powerful enough to encourage hundreds and thousands. It should make them feel like they are going to be a part of something bigger.

2. Plan informal get-togethers

When a group of people go on a tour or participate in outdoor activities, they feel more connected. Use this idea to build your event community. For instance, invite your guests a few days before the event date and take them on a guided tour. Or if most of your guests are local people, you can arrange a casual clambake days before the event just to make the guests familiar with each other. That way, you can foster a sense of community among your invitees even before they join the event. Similarly, it would be a good idea to organize post-event get-togethers to help strengthen the bonding.

3. Reward proactive participants

Not all your guests are equally enthusiastic about your event. Or maybe not everyone is good at showing off their excitement, even when they want to. Some of your guests could be more active than others. As a host, your job is to reward the proactive participants. That way, you’re giving a message that you prefer active participation. Eventually, it will inspire more people to open up and shout for your cause.

3 Common Event Planning Loopholes and How to Avoid Them

Even when you plan your corporate events down to the last detail, mistakes occur. Maybe it’s not a typical mistake from your end, but the scope of the event changed at the last minute, catching you off guard on the big day.

There could be a problem with your food catering, training room rental, classroom rental, or whatever. The thing is; you should be prepared for sudden changes to your plan. In fact, plan the unplanned for your foolproof success. Here are the three common last-minute hiccups to be aware of and prepare for.

1. A sudden increase in the demand for tickets

This seemingly good news could easily turn into a nightmare if you’re not prepared. Usually, you’ll have an estimate for the ticket selling. But if the demand suddenly skyrockets, you could be a deer in the headlight. So what’s the solution? It is always better to outsource your ticketing and registration to a third party that specializes in the niche. That way, you save time and energy and can rest assured that any ticketing issues will be taken care of.

2. Not enough food

Even when you hire a professional caterer, you can run out of food if more people than expected turn up on the big day. The ideal solution for this would be to look for a caterer that offers 10-15% buffer on the agreed-upon number. For instance, you order food for 100 people; your caterer will have arrangements for 115. In the event of a more-than-estimated turn-up, this could be a lifesaver.

3. Staffing issues

Volunteers and staffs notifying their unavailability at the last minute is a common problem. Grandmother fell ill, not feeling well, relative expired – whatever the reason – if your staff or volunteers let you down at the last moment, it could be a disaster. One good antidote would be to have a reserve bench ready, in case you’d need them.

Of course, there are many more event planning issues that might pop up at the last minute, and we’ll cover more of them. So please stay tuned.

3 More Tips to Develop Persuasive Skills in Sales

All great persuaders understand human psychology. But here’s the thing. You don’t need a degree in psychology to be a master persuader. Great salespeople are master persuaders but most of them probably didn’t read hundred books on the topic. They learned from experience corporate training sessions.

If you think your sales team lacks persuasive skills, you can rent training room or rent classroom to provide them training on how to develop persuasive skills. Here are some ideas.

1. Use the power of reciprocity

It’s human nature to reciprocate. If you treat someone well, chances are that they’ll treat you equally well. If you do someone a favor, they’ll typically want to return the favor. Along similar lines, if you help your customers find the right solution for them, they’ll probably reciprocate by buying stuff from you.

2. Show authority

One way to have more customers follow you is by establishing your brand as an authority in the niche. You can do this simply by offering valuable advice to your target audience without expecting something in return. This requires constant researching, studying, and keeping updated with the market trends. Perhaps your salespeople are too busy to spend so much time on market research. That’s exactly why you need to organize training sessions for them from time to time, so that they can know the latest trends without having to go through the rigorous market survey.

3. Use social proof

Skepticism is a big barrier in sales. In this day and age when marketing shows even a bad product in good light, people are more skeptical about any claim than ever before. Most people now read customer reviews and testimonials before making a buying decision. If your product has a good track record, you should use social proofs to hook more customers to your store. It is by far the easiest and most effective way to convince people to buy from you.