An Introduction to High Performance and Wellbeing at Work offers practical insights grown from years of experience and decades of evidence. This Short Course offers inspiration and actionable solutions, helping you to assess current practice in your company, department or team, suggesting pathways to change, engaging your people in change, and signposting you towards further sources of information and support.

The course will benefit senior and emerging leaders, middle managers, members of change teams and employee representatives in organisations from all sectors.

You will gain an introductory understanding of Workplace Innovation as an evidence-based and systemic approach to building high performance and employee engagement through step-by-step changes in working practices. The course will provide you with a practical knowledge and understanding of the following topics: Business strategy and the case for organisational change / Creating effective jobs and teams / Organisational and workforce readiness for digital technologies / Employee-driven innovation & improvement / Organisational structures, management and procedures / Employee voice / Leadership & management behaviours to engage and empower your people / Co-created leadership / People-centred change.

This course focuses on the leadership knowledge and skills that create shared direction and purpose. It is less concerned with the central, charismatic individual and more with the ways in which effective leaders engage employees. The course will examine how these leaders create organisation-wide opportunities for strategic thinking, shared learning, and employee voice, unleashing the full range of employee knowledge, skills, experience and creativity, embedding cultures of innovation and building organisational resilience.

The course will benefit senior and emerging leaders, middle managers, members of change teams and employee representatives in organisations from all sectors.

You will discover knowledge, skills and behaviours required to lead and transform teams, departments or whole organisations by inspiring and empowering people at every level.

You will increase your understanding of the role of leadership in aligning strategic priorities and decision making at senior levels with the practical knowledge, experience and engagement of employees throughout the organisation.

You’ll also gain the opportunity to reflect on your own leadership role and to identify the emotionally intelligent mindsets and behaviours that will enhance your personal ability to drive and deliver real change.

Digital technologies enable new ways of organising and managing the entire value chain across the product life-cycle. It can form extended value creation chains linking manufacturers with their suppliers and customers, encompassing idea generation, product development, production, delivery to the end customer and eventually recycling.

Yet past experience, as well as recent evidence from across Europe, suggests that digital technologies will only generate sustainable returns on investment when they are blended with organisational and workforce development – in short, when they are designed and deployed to enhance human skills and potential rather than diminish or replace them. This module will examine the choices available to organisations in introducing digital technologies, how to build organisational and workforce readiness for digital innovation, and how to engage employees in its implementation.

The course will benefit senior and emerging leaders, middle managers, members of change teams and employee representatives in organisations from all sectors.

You will gain actionable knowledge and understanding of the ways in which digital technologies can enhance workforce skills and productivity, leading to enhanced performance across diverse business indicators. The course will share expert knowledge and experience of how to build organisational and workforce readiness for digital innovation, and how to engage employees in the process of change.

The structure, culture and productivity of an organisation is often dependent on the emotional intelligence (EI) of its leader and people. Executives with high levels of EI are 32% more effective at building and maintaining relationships.

Leaders and managers whose approach is defensive, authoritarian, hierarchical and ultimately anxious will need to micro-manage and will often be fearful of change.

Conversely, someone who is trusting, open and humble is likely to create an organisation that is receptive to ideas, that trusts its employees to manage their time and is less concerned about status and hierarchy.

This course will help you understand the principles and practice of EI, and to explore and develop individual and team intelligence and behaviours.

The course will benefit senior and emerging leaders, middle managers, members of change teams and employee representatives in organisations from all sectors.

The course will offer compelling evidence that effective leaders and team members demonstrate high levels of emotional intelligence, building more effective relationships with colleagues and employees, stimulating creativity and innovation, and inspiring others to reach their full potential. Crucially it is about fostering the ability to see the world from others’ perspectives.

The course includes a personal EI Snapshot Profile, helping you to assess your own strengths and priorities for improvement, followed by a coaching session.

Your participation on the course will help you work more effectively with colleagues by strengthening a distinctive set of personal competencies including listening and communication skills, the ability to understand and engage with differing perspectives, and an eagerness to embrace the better argument irrespective of its source. It also builds coaching behaviours and a capacity to stimulate open, trust-based dialogue and shared understandings.

There is growing recognition that the knowledge, experience and innate creativity of people at every level of the organisation offers an invaluable – and often untapped – resource for innovation and improvement.

The course demonstrates how employees can be engaged in contributing actively and systematically to innovation in products, services and processes. Employee-Driven Innovation is a bottom-up approach which empowers people to reflect on past experiences and future challenges, to ask difficult questions, to learn from diverse places and to take part in creative dialogue with a wide range of other stakeholders.

The course will benefit senior and emerging leaders, middle managers, members of change teams and employee representatives in organisations from all sectors.

You will enhance your knowledge of how effective leadership encourages and develops enterprising behaviour in employees. You will also understand how workplace cultures that encourage employees to use their knowledge and creativity lead to the continuous improvement of organisational performance and a better working environment.

The course will provide you with a practical knowledge and understanding of the following topics:

1. Latest thinking about innovation
2. The workplace drivers of enterprising behaviour
3. Continuous improvement and beyond
4. How leading organisations engage employees in innovation
5. Building the business case for employee engagement in innovation.

There is no common blueprint for successful change. Each organisation undertakes its own individual journey of exploration and discovery, trial and error, experimentation and learning, before eventually arriving at an approach which reflects its own specific context and aspirations.

Drawing on extensive research and practical experience, the course will explore the key success factors found in the change journeys of many leading organisations. The course will provide you with the knowledge, skills and practical tools that will help you to lead effective and sustainable change by engaging the commitment and enthusiasm of colleagues, people you manage and senior teams.

The course will benefit senior and emerging leaders, middle managers, members of change teams and employee representatives in organisations from all sectors.

Embedding and sustaining change.

You will understand the process of change and its potential impact on people within the organisation; you will also learn how a ‘People Centred” approach can help employees at all levels to embrace change.

The course will provide you with a practical knowledge and understanding of the following topics:

• Building the business case for change;
• Engaging employees and other stakeholders in change;
• Creating a shared vision;
• Empowering and enabling others to act;
• Monitoring and reviewing progress;
• Embedding and sustaining change.