Category Archives: General

4 Great Team Building Activities Every Organization Should Conduct

Similar to organs of a body that connect with each other and listen to commands of the brain, every department within an organization works in the same manner. Any weakness somewhere causes damage to the whole organization, so you wouldn’t compromise loosing it anyway. To keep the blood flow smooth, you need to keep the vessels, veins and valves clean:

  • Run performance checks regularly and find out the root cause of the problem
  • Rectify issues and potential threats to the organization in the lights of the findings
  • Keep grooming organization’s overall skill set and set higher, more challenging KPIs

While some might take strict and formal route, you can always choose slightly longer and winded path that has definite but possibly constructive outcomes. Smart entrepreneurs understand that human behaviors can be changed, but not with strict rules. Employees should rather learn from what they did.

This is where team building activities fit perfectly. These activities may be conducted in a classroom setting. So, you can get a classroom for rent if you don’t have too much space in your organization. Best thing about them is, anybody can play and learn. So let’s learn how to play

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1. Road Map Game   

Objective: planning and strategy

Time allowed: 30 minutes

What to do: vacation planning in the lights of the city map provided.

Divide participants into two teams and set their allowance, vehicle, fuel consumption and entertainment spots. After planning, both teams will argue which one came up with a better plan.

2. Mine Field

Objective: listening skills, building trust

Time: 2 – 5 minutes for each participant

What to do: crossing the mine field by staying safe

For mine field, you need a larger room to place obstacles and create a walking path. One participant from each team will be blind folded who is supposed to cross the mine field, while others standing outside the field need to instruct him/her how to cross the field without running into the mines. If any blind folded team member comes in contact with the mine, he/she has to go back to the starting point and restart.

3. Egg Drop

Objective: time management and problem solving

Time: One hour

What to do: make an egg packaging to secure an egg falling from 3 to 4 meter height

Each team will be divided into 5 members at most. They have to make a basket or packaging secure enough to hold an egg falling from 4-meter height. Preparation will take about an hour, then their efforts will be put to test.

4. Legoman

Objective: adaptability, management, memorizing, trust building and observation

Time: one hour

What to do: replicate the sculptor without touching it.

Split employees into two groups and place a sculptor at the same distance from each of them. Provide plastic blocks to replicate the sculptor. Only one member from each team can go and observe it without touching. Then he/she instructs rest of the team members how to create a replica, giving details of specs and colors of the blocks.

For workshops and training sessions where you can implement these activities, you can get training room rental Singapore at fairly reasonable rate.

8 Professional Tips to Conduct Effective Training Sessions

It’s not just the knowledge that made you a good trainer. It’s not just your delivery style that gave you a reputation. It’s about knowing the end results. There is no doubt that trainers bring value addition with their skills and experience, but training is made successful by trainees, i.e. when they rate them as “Good”.

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In order to make training effective, trainers need to understand how they are going to be evaluated. By sticking to the principle – “End is more important than means”, you’ll have clear understanding about what is expected of you.

Training Evaluation Form

The form contains simple multiple-choice questions related to following things:

1. Qualities of trainer

Trainers are evaluated on the basis of their knowledge, enthusiasm, patience, acceptance, intellect, readiness, preparation, behavior, and most importantly, the overall presentation.

Read 6 Qualities Of A Great Trainer to get more information

2. Quality of training

Organizations take this aspect very seriously. They want to know the level of appreciation (or disappointment) of trainees.  This section of evaluation refers to trainee’s expectations and acceptance, level of instructions provided, duration, punctuality, quality of training equipment and material offered, training facility, and the overall satisfaction level.

Singapore offers great training and seminar room rental facilities to everyone, from smallest to largest businesses. Organizations want to ensure high-end training environment. It’s obvious they’d pay to get the best training room rental facility. Now, whatever is left for an effective training rests on your shoulders.

Tips to Conduct Effective Training

Here are some important questions related to trainer’s method of teaching. Each question has 4 possible answers, ranging from poor to excellent. Learn what’s left to make a nice impression on audience.

Training Question1

Training Tip: Do some research prior to sessions. Add facts & figures and other industry-related information to make your training interesting

Training Question2

Training Tip: the key is to keep their involvement in balance. Don’t go to deep in details; tell them about relevant sources and useful links to get details.

Training Question3

Training Tip: Avoid annoying questions by simply saying, “I’ll gladly give my reply on this one after the class, because it has such and such details”.

Training Question4

Training Tip: Raise your level by continuously monitoring their work during practice sessions. Tell everyone if someone finds, or asks something special (that you forgot to tell).

Training Question5

Training Tip: To stress on certain points, refer to tips and advice of industry experts, and latest researches relevant to the field.

Training Question6

Training Tip: This is something you have to take care yourself. But don’t be too formal to scare them away.

Training Question7

Training Tip: start with 60/40 rule (60% of the time for lecture, 40% for practice and follow-ups) then gradually reduce lecture time to 40% in the final stages of your training.

Training Question8

Training Tip: read about presentation skills, communication skills, management skills, time-management skills and leadership skills.

In addition to these, they will also rate the overall environment and the quality of equipment used in training. Make sure the classroom rental provides nice and comfortable space for training. The management may decide to continue renting the same venue for training in future.

7 Steps To Conduct Successful Business Seminars

In countries like Singapore, you can see a lot of public speaking sessions, training and seminars. The reason is, the place offers so much to potential businesses and seminars can serve their purpose better. Your employer can get the best seminar room for rent, but he would be keener to sell his product through you – his best speaker.

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Conducting a seminar isn’t as easy as it looks. Not too many people would suggest giving a public presentation because of the skills it takes to attract, engage and convince your audience. So, here are some steps to make your seminars successful.

Things to do before “The Final Day”

1. Know Your Prospects

The first words of advice from any expert speaker would be “Know Your Audience”. Its quite imperative that you do it for them so better understand them. Evaluate their demographics and prepare yourself!

Seminar Audience

2. The Real Deal

Without going too deep into it, let’s jump to action points.

  • Introduce and show the “Big Picture”. Your introduction holds the key to help attendants follow you, or spend the rest of the time texting.
  • Not to mention that the body must be appealing with to-the-point script. Add all the relevant points. It depends upon the message how many points you can create, but it should not contain less than two points. Three will be awesome. Then add details, examples and anything that make sense.
  • Moving onto the closing, it should connect each point and must be brief. It should have a few suggestions and actionable points.

3. Visual Aids

Jot down elements that you want to present through attention-grabbing visuals. Do some research and find out the latest techniques to make visuals more interesting. While over-head projector and multimedia projector is offered by almost every seminar room rental company in Singapore, its better to try and test results for satisfaction. Some other items include posters, brochures, interactive models and pictures etc.

4. Practice

Even if you’re seasoned performer, don’t ever avoid practice! It helps make you relaxed and professional throughout the seminar. Ask your peers to join in and give feedback and suggestions regarding your style, tone, order and gesture.

Things to do “On the Seminar Day”

5. The Setup

Arriving early is important to make last-minute adjustments in the seminar room or especially if you have rented a training room which are you are unfamiliar with.

  • Check all the equipment, items, backups, refreshments, attendants list, feedback papers, stationery, your visiting card and other things.
  • Go through your list of items quickly.
  • Greet your guests and help them to their designated seats.
  • Take 5 minutes alone (anywhere in the premises).

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6. Give Your Best

You can only give your best by sticking to the topic and outline. You know the scope and limitations of your seminar, and going beyond the topic will consume extra time which is the last thing you would want. Some tips may be:

  • Be clear and polite.
  • Speak slowly and maintain loudness
  • Change your pitch to emphasize
  • Pay attention to questions because it’s a good sign for you
  • Don’t rush to end certain points that need more elaboration. You can always skip some details in the next point.

7. Be There!

After conclusion, wait for your audience to ask questions; give feedback; or follow you up and purchase your product or idea.

Employee Training and Responsibilities of Organization

Learning takes place in every stage of life. Even if you’re aware of it or not you’re going through continuous learning process all the time. For example, when you forget to save a word document in your PC and all of a sudden, your PC shuts down because of a power failure, you’ll learn something, don’t you? It is an incidental learning. But the there are more structured and planned learning processes.

In order to meet latest trends and to educate employees on new machinery or practices, organizations tend to spend on training and development programs. It happens in services industries, particularly in departments that deal with customers throughout the day. While training is inevitable for new employees, existing employees need refreshers and training on new products, as well as the modification in existing product line.

In advanced countries like Singapore, scope of training is broader because every day new business emerge in the scene and new technology is being introduced. Thus, training and development has become a continuous cycle for both, new and old employees. This is the reason why training room rental industry has been getting a lot of attention. Now, you can rent classroom and hold a training session for your employees, anytime you want.

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Following are some of major responsibilities of organization to hold successful training for their employees:

  1. Job Description

Formulation and provision of well-crafted job description is of primary importance. All training activities are largely based on this important foundation. Employees are concerned whether particular training would help them improve performance, and they tend to show their response according to the importance of training. A clear description along with the need assessment will be more helpful in getting their attention.

  1. Improvement in Competency

Competency level is different among employees and it is your responsibility to improve their level by assessing their flaws and use best possible ploy for training. Some employees lack basic competence, so, a good training program becomes an opportunity for them to remove their flaws.

  1. Develop Understanding

Organization must have good knowledge, abilities and skills to deliver comprehensive training on all necessary aspects. After the training, the employees must have clear idea about the goals of the organizations and necessary means to achieve them.

  1. Continuous Training

It’s not a one time activity. Training must be recurring and there must be ample amount of learning opportunities for employees. Be it an incident with the client; a report published by government; or anything important related to operations.

  1. Individual Improvement

Organization is also responsible to explain the process and encourage them to individually develop themselves for improved performance. What is expected of them in future and how they should improve are the basic purpose of any training program.

  1. Support Ideas

If anyone comes up with a learning opportunity, organization must support the idea and provide resources so that every single employee should learn.

  1. Encourage Employees to Share

Organizations must encourage employees to share their everyday experiences. It’ll help find something worth learning.

Hopefully, these responsibilities will help you develop a good foundation for employees training and development program. Don’t forget that you can rent training or seminar room for any kind of learning opportunity.

How to Make Your Training Sessions Memorable

Effective-Training-compressorStudents or trainees might forget what they were trained for, but they will surely remember the trainer because of the way he communicated throughout the session. It’s totally natural that the trainees won’t remember how the seats were placed, how good was the equipment, or whether or not you gave an in-house training or conducted a session in some rented training room venue. The only thing they remember is how effective was your style and presentation.

If you’re lucky to be in Singapore and you’re working somewhere, you must have taken a few training sessions in order to keep yourself updated with new things related to your profession. As an experienced professional, you can easily realize that small things made huge differences. You must have remembered the funniest incident in a training room, or you can easily refer to few jokes shared by your trainer. These are the things that develop interest in sessions especially when the subject matter is dry enough to make you drowsy.

5 Methods to Make Your Training Interesting

If you’re having butterflies in your stomach and you’re preparing for your first training session, or a seminar presentation, these lines will help you conduct a memorable session.

  1. Add fun in learning

Chances are, your training session will have a boring topic and it’ll be full of complicated seminar-room-rental-settingtheories and concepts only few will understand. By adding elements of fun, you can develop their interest in the topic. Then there’s more related to fun:

  • Participants will understand the message easily
  • As you work your way to remove silence and shyness, the participants will come up with queries and their own problems.
  • They can respond to your questions in a better way.
  1. Don’t hesitate to add humor

Humor always keeps attendants motivated and enthusiastic. Moreover, you can elaborate your point with statistics and related theories. You’re not allowed to tell jokes because someone might feel offended. Use self-deprecating humor to keep their interest alive.

  1. Professional-package-compressorGive a professional package

Take help from modern equipment and materials to add value to your session. Make sure to throw a complete package full of interesting presentations, latest statistics and modern equipment. A thoroughly professional package makes the right impact on your attendants and they will understand the importance of training. Rest assured, you will find all necessary items in classroom rental that make your session a memorable one.

  1. Encourage participation

A thumb rule of effective training is to divide the time tactfully. A good training session comprises of 20% of teaching time and 80% of training time during which participants practice in groups. Encourage your trainees to speak candidly and enthusiastically. In this way, they will give more than 100% and learn quickly.

  1. Build their self-esteem

Today, when companies tend to stress more and more on training, employees tend to lose interest because they rarely find these sessions helpful. It has become a common perception that companies conduct training to accumulate money. As a trainer and coach, your job is to build their self-esteem and educate them how they can implement your training in their work.

6 Qualities Of A Great Trainer

Everybody knows Singapore is the land full of opportunities for every kind of business. The place offers educated labor, favorable conditions and some great clients to work with. At the same time, natives have made sure the workforce stays updated with new trends and professions and improve their skills through short-term training.

With some remarkable training venues and advanced training equipment, the place has every good reason to establish your business and train local people according to your own requirement. Even if you don’t own a facility, you can get rent training rooms in suitable locations at reasonable rates.

In connection to this, you may want a local hand to train your employees, in order to get the best out of them. So, what things should you consider that separates an ordinary trainer from a great one?

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Here are some qualities of a great trainer to help you find the best one:

1. Complete Command Over Training Material

It is expected of a trainer that he must know each and every word of the material so that he can relate to real life examples. In connection to this, he must be able to provide authentic and complete information to every participant.

2. Energy and Rhythm

Maintaining energy is important and great trainer knows how to tune his energy level according to that of the class. Making dry content engaging and attractive is the art and that’s where great trainer makes the real difference by adjusting his delivery and including interesting fill-ups in the middle.

3. Preparation and Practice

Practice is essential. It helps keeping the lectures and training easy and less complicated. Besides, it’s quite awkward if the trainer keeps looking into his notes, which affects the flow of speech. You must have experienced such training sessions and how boring they turned out. Practice doesn’t mean you go through each and every topic, you also need to use the equipment as well.

Classroom rental offers different training equipment to increase the interest of trainees and keep them on tract all the time.

4. Readiness, Encouragement and Engagement

To make a training more productive and result oriented, a good trainer engages his students to share their past experiences related to previous jobs. Remember, they’re here to learn new things and they can only do so by understanding them in their own ways. So, a good trainer allows cross-pollination to illustrate the material and talk to his students at their level.

5. Self Satisfaction

Training is a profession that demands great research skills. Trainers are expected to be on their toes and deliver 110% all the time. The more they research the more self confident they are, in order to satisfy the demands of their students. Research helps them stay on the topic and dig deeper, and make their training easier to grasp.

6. Organization Support

Here, you, as a business owner, are responsible to provide your trainers with best facility, equipment and opportunities to grow. In general, trainers’ burnout rate is high and it depends upon how supportive is their organization. If you give them sufficient amount of time to prepare and reasonable breaks, you will actually increase their professional life.

4 Types of Seminars to Support Thinking and Communication Among Students

Seminar Room Rental

In Singapore, different kinds of seminars are being held by some learning centers and education institutes. Unlike traditional seminars, these seminars are different, because:

  • They are focused on enhancing student’s intellect
  • They have flexible teaching process,
  • Participants from different walks of life may attend them
  • These seminars don’t follow specific setting

The purpose of such seminars is to improve communication and enhance thinking process. Following are the four types of seminars that can be easily arranged in a seminar room:

1. Community seminar

These seminars involve adults with some common purpose which may be figurative or literal. Such seminars are organized for people who are facing difficulty in their work. Community seminars are held to improve collaboration among two parties with different views. For example, a dialogue between retired individuals with very low pension, and concerned government officials builds collaborative understanding and promote thinking process.

Similarly, a seminar involving parents, teachers and students is also a community seminar, but it’s different from traditional “Parent-teacher meeting” or an “Annual Report-day”.  It involves input from parents and other community members, in the form of experiences and ideas to improve the level of education.

2. Content Area seminar

This type of training seminar is integrated with typical classroom setup. The idea behind introducing content concept into the classroom is to encourage students to think objectively about their curriculum. You can introduce content area seminar at any stage of the course, and can design a seminar specifically for your course.

For example, you can organize a faculty seminar for business students and motivate them to enroll into professional accounting courses. You can do so by introducing ACCA, CA and ACMA professionals and let the students discuss their concerns. Content-area seminars may also be helpful in the middle of any course, when students can talk to professionals regarding what they studied in class.

To do that, and to attract more students, you can rent a proper training room and have good setup and create awareness about the course you’re offering. The content area seminar will help you:

  • Promote the purpose of your course, training or subject
  • Students can relate to real life examples where they can implement it

3. Faculty seminar

Faculty seminars involve individuals who are experienced and they can share their ideas about the profession. It means, adult learners, like teachers or faculty members can sit and share their ideas that they can put into practice.

Such seminars can change education culture and give new learning experience to students.

4. School-Wide seminar

As the name suggests, these seminars are designed for schools, to create and promote unified culture. These seminars are normally held in a large place, probably school’s assembly area. Every student and teacher is required to participate in it. As the purpose of seminar is to strengthen the school culture, there is set of planned questions and texts. Seminar leaders may alter the questions according to their requirements.

These seminars may be new to some education institutes but they can change the way of learning and create the importance of studies among students.

Tips To Deal With Noisy Students In The Classroom

This video shares some useful and interesting tips to deal with noisy students in the classroom.

Interestingly, very young in his career, the author raised his voice and shouted at the students to quiet down during his early part of his career.

Of course, he realised that this method was ineffective and have developed his strategies to deal with ‘monkeys’ in the class. Watch on..

If you need a conducive, affordable and convenient training room, seminar room or classrooms to conduct your event, visit us at TrainingRoomSG.com

4 Things to Consider In a Conference Room

Conferences and seminars to business are just like paint to home. They add value and attract customers. In Singapore, businesses are keen to hold seminars, conferences and training sessions to attract clients, because the place offers them a wide range of opportunities to expand globally.

While top companies in Singapore have their own conference facilities and occasional seminars in public halls and hotels, small businesses can also hold conferences and seminars by taking seminar room for rent.

Training-Room-Rental-Singapore-Picture-2Having mentioned that, there are few things that will help you make an impression on your clients and participants.

1. Check for Standard Equipment

Collaboration among internal and external customers is essential for successful seminars and meetings. To ensure functional workspace, you need to have the right equipment placed at the right places. Nowadays, training room rental companies have much to offer, beyond furnished tables and comfy chairs.

  • White board: Whether it’s an internal meeting or a seminar, whiteboard helps participants discuss plans and follow them easily. Then there are other meeting room tools to pay attention to.
  • Food/Beverage area: Longer meeting sessions and seminars must have refreshment breaks. Make sure the facility you rented offers food and beverages or should have a canteen inside its premises.

2. Pay Attention to Design

The chosen meeting venue should look comfortable for all the team members. Same is true for seminar rooms. This where rental rooms are preferable, because they are well-maintained, properly cleaned, and have up-to-date equipment. Yet there are few things you should see in them:
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  • Proper lighting – light brings out creativity, overall morale and quality of work. But, avoid florescent lights which might cause headaches. Apart from electric lights, natural light is also good for the overall environment.
  • Wall colors – choose the room that has calming colors. For example, blue and yellow are more suitable because they increase chances of agreeableness and calmness among participants. Avoid bright or clashing colors.

3. Minimize Distractions

Distractions reduce productivity. Avoid distractions in a meeting room to keep your participants engaged.

  • Check all fixtures – make sure all lights work properly. There must be proper ventilation and the room fans (ceiling or pedestal fan) work noiselessly. Replace the wobbly tables and chairs as well.
  • Furniture – you should have enough chairs to accommodate every one, even if the table space is not sufficient. In this way, people will concentrate on their work rather than surroundings.

4. Avoid Crowding the Room

The conference or seminar room should have collaborative environment. Distribution of furniture must be thoughtful. Avoid furniture that puts group leaders or heads in the way of those who don’t speak too much.

spacious design

  • Round table – if it’s a meeting and the number of people are not too many, have a round table meeting or conference that allows every one to connect to the speaker and with each other as well.
  • Avoid tiered seating – all seating options should have the same level. It allows everyone to view and to be viewed properly.
  • Seating space – expert suggests there should be enough space for participants to stand up and move around.

Conference room design determines how participants use it Participants are likely to show high productivity, if the conference room offers sufficient equipment, space and furniture.

How A Recycling Bin and Scrap Paper Illustrated Privillege

This story illustrates how during a training class, a teacher tried to illustrate privilege to the students by merely using paper and a waste bin.

Essentially, the teacher is trying to show that people seated at the front row will normally not know that they are in a privileged position and the better their odds are in life. And, it’s normally the students who are in the back row who can see and will highlight their disadvantaged position.

Quite a controversial piece of article but nevertheless, an interesting read. To read more, go to here.