Virtual Work in the New Normal

A busy personal life has a direct correlation to your productivity level at your job. By getting control of your productivity at home, you can improve your productivity work too, making you better able to stick to schedules and meet deadlines by reducing the stress and distractions that come from trying to juggle home and work at the same time. In this course, you'll learn how to prepare for trips, plan personal and household tasks, and become more organized as a parent. You'll also explore tips for achieving an effective work/life balance and taking care of your personal health and well-being.

If you want to manage your schedule and make your time count, you have to be organized. But to stay organized, you need to check your progress. This mean developing schedule management skills. The stress and potential for mistakes grows when you don't spend time organizing your time. In this course, you'll discover how schedule management can help you regain control of your time. You'll learn how to leverage your personality to boost your productivity and explore techniques for dealing with time stealers. And you'll learn how to create practical to-do lists and keep them relevant and realistic.

People react to high pressure differently. Learning to cope with pressure and handling stress are very important, because you don't want pressure to have a negative impact on your performance. In this course, you'll learn about managing stress and pressure, situations that trigger pressure, and how pressure can become stress. You'll also look at how stress affects you emotionally and physically, and how to respond to it. And you'll also learn strategies for managing stress by ensuring you have the right attitude, taking control under pressure, and using performance management to cultivate a "success mentality." You can then optimize your own performance, and prepare to cope with stressed colleagues.

Companies often opt to create virtual teams in place of on-site teams. This allows employees to work from home or remote locations. However, if not managed appropriately, remote working may cause breakdowns in communication, collaboration, and teamwork. In this course, you'll learn how to develop the skills you need to show team leadership and be an effective member of a virtual team. You'll explore personal traits that are useful when working on a team remotely. You'll also learn strategies to stay connected with other team members, and ways to manage your time and overcome the challenges associated with managing teams remotely.

The amount of time available to you is constant - you can't buy more and you can't save it for later. However, by managing your time, you can increase your productivity. And the better you understand your own personal productivity, the easier it will be to manage your time effectively. In this course, you'll learn about how you can use task management to maximize your productivity. You'll discover the benefits of using time management and assessing the value of your tasks. You'll learn about benefits of setting goals and how productivity is tied to your ability to assess time and set priorities. And you'll also learn about the process of "chunking" your time and how to use different types of to-do lists effectively.

Building relationships with the people you want to communicate with is key to making communication effective. And building trust is essential to forging meaningful working relationships. In this course, you'll explore the necessity of clearly presenting your information and intentions as the basis of effective communication. You'll see how understanding your audience ensures that your message is delivered in such a way so to maximize its impact and how managing your emotions allows you to adapt to the emotional needs of others to build trust. Finally, you'll learn how verbal communication combines with body language and vocal tone to better convey your message effectively.

Developing and maintaining relationships with your peers at work can lead to success for both you as an individual, and within your organization. Networking skills and building supportive peer relationships can provide you with a wide variety of experiences, expertise, and institutional knowledge. Whether you're exploring executive networking, professional networking, or just general business networking, this course explains how to identify the people in your organization who are important in helping you reach your goals. You'll learn the skills that maintain solid, mutually beneficial relationships so you can advance your career.

When you're constantly adding items to your never-ending to-do list, feeling overwhelmed at work and at home, and finding your health and relationships negatively impacted, you are likely experiencing stress. Stress is produced by your own feelings and reactions to certain external events, rather than by the events themselves. But while you may not always be able to control the external events causing your stress, by applying mindfulness techniques, you can control your reactions to them. This course explains the physiological, behavioral, and psychological signs and symptoms of stress and where it can come from. It outlines strategies for maintaining work/life balance and managing stress. It also covers ways to change your responses to stress and make them more positive and how to use relaxation techniques and adopting mindfulness to help you focus.

People with a healthy work-life balance are satisfied with both their work and home lives. They can fulfill their multiple family responsibilities at home, as well as work and community commitments without guilt or regret. They're healthy physically, emotionally, and socially. They're not over-worked. In fact, they have a sense of control over their life, and feel that the decisions they make are informed choices. In this course, you'll learn about how to detect imbalance between home and work and how to achieve a healthy compromise between work balance and life balance. And you'll assess your current work/life balance so you can overcome internal and external obstacles to achieving harmony.

Change can be disruptive, but adapting to change can also open new possibilities. A changing work situation can create a period of uncertainty while you adapt. A clear understanding of what organizational change is can help build your resilience and flexibility. In this course, you'll find out what can trigger organizational change. You'll explore common responses to change and the stages of reacting to change that people go through when dealing with organizational change. You'll learn why it's important to be resilient when adapting to change, and how to prepare yourself to get the most out of change.

Business today is a complex undertaking. Accomplishing tasks an staying focused on achieving your goals requires grit and persistence. An adaptive mindset helps you focus through the distractions, information overload, demanding pace, and the accompanying stresses that can often pull you off task. In this course, you'll learn to develop personal resiliency, adaptability, and perseverance. You'll explore the resources and people it takes to sustain perseverance, and you'll discover actions to help you build a work-life balance, sharpen your focus, and foster the resilience perseverance to face and overcome setbacks.

Building and managing teams is enough of a challenge when everyone is in the same location. Collaboration when working on a team that's virtual requires even more commitment. In this course, you'll learn about teamwork and team leadership when working on a virtual team. You'll cover remote management and tactics for communication, assessment, and meetings for virtual teams.

Managing teams successfully involves ensuring that team members can communicate with you and with one another and that they will collaborate effectively as a team. To achieve this, clear channels of communication are required for both on-site and virtual teams. In this course, you'll learn how to demonstrate team leadership by encouraging effective communication and overcoming communication problems. You'll explore strategies for encouraging team collaboration. Finally, you'll learn about tools and technologies that are commonly used for virtual teamwork and key considerations for establishing virtual communication guidelines.

All organizations must go through some type of change in order to adapt to new market forces. Adapting to change, whether it involves new processes, strategies, or personnel, is never easy, but is a vital aspect of a company's long-term success and resilience. In this course, you'll learn about key outputs of a change initiative, such as success factors that improve an organization's flexibility and make it more resilient. You'll explore how to identify stakeholder groups needed when adapting to new processes, and the roles they play in changing operations. You'll also learn how to evaluate the three keys to sustainable change: discomfort, vision and proper skill level.

Effective business leadership is never more needed than during the difficult times of a company crisis. The way you handle tough conversations or deliver a difficult message can make or break the situation. It's essential to have crisis management strategies to improve outcomes. In this course, you'll discover ways of managing in a crisis, including how to manage difficult conversations and crisis communications.