It’s been an intense summer so far, and there’s still plenty of hot weather coming our way. Maybe you’re on vacation, or maybe you’ve dialled back your work to enjoy the sunshine. Why not build in some learning as well? Summer’s a great time to add new skills and training, and August features plenty of free webinars. We hope they will inspire and motivate you.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: The Happiness Advantage at Work Part 3: Embedding Happiness into Your Leadership and Culture

Research featured in Harvard Business Review shows improvements in happiness and well-being associated with positive outcomes in employee engagement (up to 10x more engaged) and higher levels of sales (37 percent average increase across multiple studies). Social support was shown to improve not only levels of employee satisfaction but also lead to improvements in customer loyalty and industry service metrics.

We have learned that retraining our brains to become more positive, more adaptive, and more resilient in order to gain a competitive advantage at work is not only possible, it is essential in rapidly changing environments.

While there are many exciting possibilities on the horizon to assist organizations in creating a new, happy culture for their employees, the most promising approach is to focus in on how we do business each day. By targeting our most important work routines and embedding more positivity into them, we move beyond “talking about happiness” and into making it a generative, powerful force at work.

In this third of a three-part webinar series on The Happiness Advantage at Work, Devin Hughes, Chief Inspiration Officer at International Thought Leader Network (training and research partner with Harvard happiness researcher and internationally best-selling author Shawn Achor), talks to Mark Eggerding, Vice President at US Foods, about the daily practices and work routines necessary for organizations and their managers to lead positive change.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Healthcare IS Another Language (Free for ATD members)

Healthcare literacy is a major issue. According to the healthcare industry's own data, 90 percent of the U.S. population is healthcare illiterate. How can this be? Why aren’t plain-English initiatives and writing to the sixth- to eighth-grade level helping to resolve this?

Carol Heiberger has done a lot of research in the fields of linguistics, language acquisition, and neuroscience to identify the actionable information associated with how adults learn. In this webcast, she will summarize the findings and address their impact on both the workplace and healthcare literacy.

In this session, attendees will learn to:

Consider healthcare as its own language.
Understand why providers use confusing terms and jargon.
Teach patients and caregivers new words and terms.
Identify barriers to understanding.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: I Learned It, But Now I’ve Forgotten It . . . How Micro-Video Can Drive Learning Retention

Delivering learning to employees is only the first key step in improving performance. Employees have to retain the gains in knowledge and skill, or the time, energy, and effort that went into the program was for nothing—wasted. The challenge for many organizations and professionals is that we focus so intently on employee learning, we overlook whether our employees retain any of what they learn. As it turns out, reinforcement of lessons learned is a powerful part of learning and vitally important.

The great news is that recently emerging research is helping us learn more about exactly what reinforcement methods really work, and why. The challenge for organizations is to refocus existing tools, content, and communication tools on the very targeted and specific activities that yield great results at improving employee retention.

In this session, you’ll learn about “the forgetting curve” and methods, techniques, and tools (including video) that can reverse the forgetting curve and lead directly to much higher returns on investments in improved performance.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Employee Engagement Best Practices at NRC (Free for ATD members)

Employee engagement is more important now than ever in the federal government. As agency budgets continue to be constrained, there are fewer resources available to perform increasing work demands. Tapping into people’s discretionary effort through higher levels of employee engagement is critical. Further, as the economy and the private sector job market improve, federal employees may choose to leave government for private-sector jobs. Employee engagement can help lower employee attrition, and improve the ability to retain talent.

In this webinar, Jody Hudson, deputy chief human capital officer of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), will share NRC’s best practices in employee engagement. NRC has consistently been ranked among the top three agencies in the federal government by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, based on the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey results and the associated Engagement Index. In this webinar, you will learn:

How to boost employee engagement in the face of budget constraints.
How to lower employee attrition and keep from losing government employees to private-sector jobs.
How federal government managers can improve their ability to retain top talent.

Thursday, August 6, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Becoming Your Organization's Chief Change Officer

You can’t expect your people to change if the leaders are not willing to go first. To drive change, you must help your people understand the changing marketplace, the strategy to address that change, and the important role each plays in delivering that strategy. This typically requires new thinking, new behaviours, and new processes. If you aren’t modelling those changes then you can’t expect your people to do it.

During this fun and engaging webinar, Gary Magenta, Senior Vice President at Root Inc., a strategy execution consulting company, identifies how today’s best organizations are successfully navigating through change, while offering insights that have helped leaders successfully drive change initiatives.
This webinar highlights ways to engage your employees in your strategy and change process—showing how powerful visual images, storytelling, and facilitated conversation can create excitement, buy-in, and accountability for change.

Thursday, August 6, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: How to be a Productivity Ninja in L&D (Free for CSTD members)

Information overload is a big problem. Many of us are overwhelmed by information and the potential distractions we face at work, as well as the spill-over effect into our personal lives. It’s no longer enough to just focus on time management: it’s time to think about how you manage your attention and habits. A “Productivity Ninja” is calm and prepared, but also skilled and ruthless in how he or she deals with the enemy that is information overload.

This webinar gives you the edge you need:

It helps people generate awareness of ingrained and unproductive habits.
It introduces practical and implementable tips related to improving focus and attention.
It explores simple ways to shift email habits for reductions in volume and time savings.
It provides a fun and memorable framework for thinking about personal productivity...
...with the 9 Characteristics of the Productivity Ninja (zen calm, agility, ruthlessness etc...)

Thursday, August 6, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Personalized Learning: Overcoming the Learning and Development Engagement Problem (Free for ATD members)

Two daunting trends—the increasing skills gap and the lack of employee engagement—are affecting the perception of learning and development (L&D) in organizations. Employees, managers, and executives are becoming increasingly disengaged from the L&D department and its offerings. It’s time to turn it around!

In this webinar you’ll learn:

The three primary contributors to learning disengagement.
Why the existing approaches aren’t working and may make the problem worse.
A new approach that leverages adult learning theory to drive learning engagement.
Steps to implement personalized learning in your organization.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015, 10AM – 1PM PT: 6 Ways to Elevate Your New Hire Onboarding – Using Virtual to Engage, Equip & Energize

Does your onboarding program leave your employees energized and excited? Or do they see it as a boring required chore? Would you like your new-hire onboarding to be more interactive and engaging?

An effective onboarding program is critical to help new hires to add value quickly and become productive members of your workforce. Join our webcast to learn how to use virtual onboarding to more effectively engage, equip and energize your employees.

In this session we'll cover best practices for:

Providing a more intuitive, engaging training experience.
Adding social and mobile learning to your training arsenal.
Using gamification to attract and motivate your learners.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: The Agile Advantages for Reducing Common Learning Development Pain Points (Free for ATD members)

You see potential in good design. You can change behaviour, drive results, decrease errors, and improve engagement. But even the best designs are jeopardized if the process lacks the ability to support them. A great learning design driven by a flawed process can create havoc, such as missed milestones, unnecessary burden on subject matter experts and reviewers, scope-creep, and unengaged learners.

In this webcast, you'll meet the Successive Approximation Model (SAM). Richard Sites will share the power of using an iterative process for the design and development of learner-centric experiences and uncover why the Agile advantages that SAM offers can mitigate common learning development pain points.

Attendees will learn how SAM can help:

Manage client expectations and content development.
Bring focus to designing performance-centred interactions.
Minimize the risk of delay and endless revisions.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Engaged Employees = Productive Employees: The Culture of Recognition

Today’s organizations struggle to engage their employees. According to the Harvard Business Review, recognition has the greatest impact on employee engagement. Brandon Hall Group’s research shows that 39 percent of employees are highly engaged and advocates of the organization. As a result, employee recognition is quickly becoming one of the greatest priorities for a company’s strategy. In fact, over one-third of organizations plan to increase their investment in recognition over the next year.

You will come away from this session with:

How to create a culture of recognition to improve employee engagement, productivity, performance, and manager engagement .
Key considerations for optimizing your rewards and recognition solutions.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015, 10AM – 1PM PT: Taking Your Performance Consulting Business to the Next Level

So you are a consultant. Do you have a business? Or is it a practice? Do you have passive revenue? Or do you only generate revenue when you are working? Do you want passive revenue? In this session Bob will share the steps he used to move from a practice to a multimillion dollar business.

Included will be:

The two ways to multiply yourself —Bob used both—and so can you.
Do you want to clone yourself? Here's how!
Passive income—12 different products from your content.
Should you have a book? How Bob did it—and how he would do it today.
Pricing models—do you charge too much—too little—just about right?

And more!

Wednesday August 12, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: This Back-to-School Season, Get Your Learners out of the Classroom (Free for ATD members)

It’s that time of year: Students are saying goodbye to summer and heading back to the classroom. However, the opposite is true of your training programs. Now is the time to take your learners out of the traditional or virtual classroom.

In this session, webinar leaders and attendees will explore why the modern workforce needs us to rethink traditional training models. Using real-world examples, three different types of non-classroom training will be explored, along with tips and tricks for shifting the composition of your L&D programs toward a more blended model—without having to start from scratch.

Attendees will learn:

Why you need to go beyond classroom-based learning to effectively train the next generation.
Three key types of non-classroom learning.
Tips for implementing these new strategies in your training programs.

Thursday, August 13, 2015, 12PM – 1PM PT: Flipping: Making (More) Passive Content Valuable

There is plenty of talk about flipping training, and then there is research on what works. Typically, more passive content is what people use on their own and more active content is saved for face-to-face delivery.

Some people say we don't learn from passive content (such as video, text, and conventional eLearning) but that's nonsense. We can and we do.

In this webinar, webinar leaders and attendees will examine the research about learning from more passive content in order to help make decisions about how to make that content valuable for that part of the flipped equation. This will also be valuable for those who develop more passive training content.

Monday, August 17, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: How to Measure the Success of Leadership Development (Free for ATD members)

Harvard Business Review's July/August issue cover story, "It's Time to Blow Up HR and Build Something New,” says it all: Investments in people need to drive value. With a $15 billion price tag, this holds true especially for leadership development. Join Patti Phillips, president and CEO of the ROI Institute, as she describes how organizations are measuring the success of leadership development. This session will focus on the application of the ROI Methodology and specific case studies described in the new book Measuring the Success of Leadership Development.

Upon completion of the session, participants will be able to:

Cite the research that supports the need to measure the success of leadership development.
Describe the step-by-step process that will ensure reliable outcomes of their measurement approach.
Explain how organizations apply the concepts described in the session.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Micro-Compliance Solutions to Reduce Time and Length of Courses

Huge investments are made on compliance courses to meet the demands of regulations, teach learners guidelines, and avoid legal liabilities. The challenge is that compliance takes an enormous amount of time and does not necessarily accomplish the results.

Micro-Compliance Solutions are methods where compliance courses are delivered by drips, snippets, and trickles distributed over a period of time for completion. Doctors, engineers, technicians, lawyers, and many others use them to digest the content better while complying with the rules and regulations.

Applications:

Identify the segments in long compliance courses that “must-be-tested.”
Convert the “must-be-tested” into drips, snippets, and trickles.
Build micro-compliance drips, snippets, and trickles that pass compliance checks and also learning for applications of the ideas.
Obtain models, demos, and templates to apply micro-compliance in small as well as enterprise levels.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: A Practical and Pragmatic Approach to HCM Technology Selection and Integrated Talent Management

In Brandon Hall Group’s annual talent management study, 94 percent of organizations indicated their talent management was ineffective. They told us their top concerns were engaging employees, developing leaders, and retaining top talent. To maximize the impact of their talent management strategy, organizations optimize their human capital processes and technological environments. With only half of organizations convinced their HCM technology is well suited for their needs, optimizing HCM technology implementation without creating process complexity is another key priority for most organizations.

Brandon Hall Group's HCMA workshop courses offer a practical and pragmatic approach to high-performance talent and business results. In their Talent Management Strategic Leader one-day workshop and HCM Technology Selection Expert one-day workshop, participants experience and use Brandon Hall Group's proprietary research and tools to develop the right talent management strategy, execute the strategy, and support its effective implementation via proper technology selection.

Join them for a highly engaging overview of their upcoming HCMA workshops.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Navigating the Hardest Part of the Sale: How Your Team Can Secure and Manage Sales Appointments Successfully (Free for ATD members)

All too often, sales leaders and trainers focus on objection handling to help reps close deals. In reality, the most important negotiations occur at the beginning of the sales process. In this webcast, you will learn about two of the most important negotiations in the sales process—securing and managing appointments—and proven techniques to secure a prospect’s time and attention. You’ll also learn ways to help train salespeople to manage these appointments with an agenda that brings objections to the forefront early in the sales process and gives the salespeople time to adapt their selling strategy before it’s too late. Helping your salespeople employ these important techniques will lead to more meetings, better productivity, shorter sales cycles, and increased sales results. Dan McGrath and Ed Medeiros will utilize a case study from the partnership between COACH MEdia and Gartner.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Lunch and Learn – Blended Learning Strategies and the 70:20:10 Framework

Organizations today are assessing their ability to drive greater individual and organizational performance with their learning strategy, which is why more and more organizations are looking to incorporate the 70:20:10 framework into their blended learning strategies.

Here are some highlights from an exclusive and industry leading study:

Prior to incorporating the framework, companies devoted an average of 43 percent of their learning efforts to formal learning.
The biggest drivers for using the framework is to improve the links between learning and both individual and organizational performance.
On-the-job assignments, short-term projects, and coaching/mentoring are considered the most effective elements of the 70:20:10 learning framework.

Webinar participants will be provided with an in-depth and behind-the-scenes look into the following:

How long and how much have organizations been working with the 70/20/10 framework?
What steps have organizations taken to implement the 70/20/10 framework?
How have organizations benefited from implementing the 70/20/10 framework?

Leveraging industry-leading proprietary data analysis and insights tool, DataNow™, experts will lead a thought-provoking review and discussion of the 70/20/10 framework.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Thinking of Replacing Your LMS

This session will help you reduce your fear about the process of replacing your learning management system—and create a strategy for success during the transition.

Your business needs are changing fast, and so are the demands placed on your current learning technology. Learning leaders must stay a step ahead of their business, but that can be difficult when dealing with antiquated technology and limited delivery options. More than 38 percent of organizations have plans to replace their existing LMS solution, according to a recent Brandon Hall survey. Most of them look forward to the transition with dread and concern. Can they make a solid business case for the change? Will the transition impact business processes or mission-critical learning needs?

Join David Wentworth, Senior Learning Analyst for Brandon Hall Group, and Saba's Charles DeNault, Senior Director, Product Marketing, as they share insights that can help reduce your fear of change and increase your odds of success. They'll discuss best practices from hundreds of successful transitions for creating a strategy for the upgrade, as well as tools and tips for preparing your organization for a limited-impact change.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015, 10AM – 10:30AM PT: Winning Support for Your Ideas (Free for CSTD members)

Support for your ideas is often won or lost based on the ability to win the confidence of the decision makers. What makes the difference between a regular proposal and a Winning Proposal? A Winning Proposal is one that uses the art of persuasion. To use the art of persuasion, you must SELL the benefits of your idea to convince people that it is in their best interest to say YES! This interactive session will show you the key rules of persuasion and how to get the YES you are looking for.

Learning Objectives:

Use the art of persuasion so your decision makers say “yes.”
Prove that your idea will solve a need.
Guide your decision makers so they “head nod” as you present the information.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: 6 Powerful Strategies for Women to Thrive at Work (Free for ATD members)

Setbacks frequently are a part of the career journey for women. While women make up roughly half of the world’s workforce, the vast majority of senior leaders across industry sectors are male. To have a successful career, women need to anticipate, navigate, and learn from the challenges they encounter.

The presenters will introduce the Intentional Resiliency framework, which they developed from extensive research and interviews. The framework consists of six strategies that help women to thrive in the face of career challenges. While the framework is focused on women, many of the strategies can be applied across genders. These strategies can be used with or without a coach.

The presenters will also provide an overview of the five International Coach Federation (ICF) competencies that are most critical when coaching to build resiliency. By using these competencies and Intentional Resiliency, you can create a positive trajectory for your career, and help others to have a career defined by growth, success, and satisfaction.

Thursday, August 20, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Micro-Video + Manager Training = High Performing Employees

Congratulations! You’ve developed the greatest training program ever. The content is ideally suited to our business problems, the technology works, and the employees seem to like it. There’s only one problem… nobody knows what to do with it when they return to their jobs. If that’s not a nightmare scenario, I don’t know what is for a training professional!

Ultimately, we need our employees to learn, retain, and then apply what they learn to improve their knowledge and skills to reach higher levels of performance. That’s the goal. But how many times do we fail to see the ROI we expect? How many times do we see really well-done content NOT applied on the job? How many times do we have to go back to the CFO and explain why the ROI we expected never materialized?

Let’s get off the merry-go-round, and bring out the big guns, and make sure our employees really apply what they learn—on-demand video reinforcement, PLUS manager training. Humans learn in ways that are not always intuitive. Emerging research is offering some amazing insights into the science of learning, and one of these insights is the stunning power of visual stimulation delivered at intervals AFTER training. When we couple video-based support for employees with manager support using the right tools, we can magnify the impact of our training efforts by significant amounts. In this session, you’ll learn some easy to adopt methods to do exactly that.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: A Robot Wants Your Job: How to Future-Proof Yourself for Tomorrow’s Workplace

Up to 47 percent of jobs are highly susceptible to computer replacement in the next decade, according to one landmark study. Robots are after your job. In original global research conducted with Oxford Economics, we discovered that the number one concern people have about their jobs is that they will become obsolete. What can people do to prepare their careers for tomorrow?

Based on the book Stretch: How to Future Proof Yourself for Tomorrow's Workplace, the session will provide both a high-level overview of the trends affecting the future of work and practical ways in which people can prepare now. Presented by Dr. Karie Willyerd, Harvard Business blogger, award-winning development expert, and co-author of the HR bestseller The 2020 Workplace, the topics will include:

The trends in play now affecting the future of work.
The five key practices that successful people use to stay current.
Predictions for the future of work.
How to get ready now.
What organizations and managers can do to help.

Wednesday, August 26, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Moving Your Training from Live to Virtual (Free for ATD members)

This webcast will be a review on how to effectively move from traditional live training to a virtual environment without losing the impact of your training program. Attendees will learn:

How to lead dynamic virtual training.
Why virtual learning can be more effective than traditional live training.
Why the technology you use plays a major role in the success of your virtual training program.

Thursday, August 27, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Creating a Patients First Culture: How the Cleveland Clinic Produced Lasting, Sustainable Change (Free for ATD members)

Patients first is the guiding principle of the Cleveland Clinic; the organization strives to provide outstanding and compassionate care and service. But creating the kind of culture capable of delivering such comprehensive service was a process years in the making. When the Cleveland Clinic created a program for a network-wide culture shift, the organization had two goals: Create a more satisfying experience for patients and produce highly engaged employees.

Many years and several lessons learned later, the successful cultural shift positively affects millions of patients and thousands of employees.

This webinar will look at what it took to create such a fundamental cultural shift and the framework the Cleveland Clinic uses daily to maintain it. In this webinar, you will learn how to:

Implement cultural change in a large healthcare system.
Sustain that cultural change even when more than 70 percent of traditional change efforts do not succeed.
Create lasting strategies to improve physician, clinical staff, and hospital employee engagement.

Friday, August 28, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: 5 Steps to Making Your Virtual Classroom Mobile and Social (Free for ATD members)

In today’s hyper-networked virtual, global, and mobile workplace, organizations are beginning to rely on informal learning using social networks and mobile technologies. This makes sense. Social media provides rich resources for informal learning outside the classroom as well as supplemental learning within the classroom. Both timely and collaborative, social media outlets provide you with the power to make sure learning occurs during your events and continues afterward. It can be used to build community and continue the learning conversation started in the classroom, as a stand-alone “just in time” set of resources for instant gratification, or for anything in between.

These elements of modern workplace training bring a host of important elements to the table for an instructional program—long-term learner engagement, non-traditional sequencing and delivery, learning environments, and communities of practice. But effective implementation of mobile and social virtual classroom strategies doesn’t just happen. A strategic approach to training design is required when you want to deploy your virtual classroom using these approaches.

This session will be focused on incorporating mobile technologies and social media into a virtual classroom event. Attendees will learn to:

Identify why, when, and how participants will be utilizing the mobile virtual classroom.
Apply design strategies that maximize the live, mobile environment.
Incorporate social media tools and networks into a virtual learning experience to accomplish formal and informal learning.
Integrate social media into virtual classroom design during and in between live sessions.