Professional Development II

Time is on Your Side

How many times have you heard yourself say, “I just don’t have time”. Time can be a friend rather than an enemy. This interactive workshop is a practical approach to the real every day business challenges of effectively managing your "overwhelming work load". You will learn how to eliminate time wasters, reduce interruptions, and keep your priorities straight. You will take away a full bag of time management tools that you will be able to immediately apply to your work life.

How to apply the concept of “Zero Time” to our work.
Methods of finding out exactly what is eating our time.
How to minimize interruptions from both the public and our co-workers
How to plan out your work so that deadlines are met on time, every time.

Understanding Yourself and Others

Until now, you might have thought that some of the people you work with came from another planet. Try as you may, you still don’t understand them and communication has become painful. This interactive workshop is a powerful look at what makes people tick. Learn about yourself and those around you by understanding how different personalities focus their energies, gather information, make decisions, and cope with the world around them. You will also learn to communicate more effectively and increase your conflict resolution skills.

Creating Successful Results and Relationships for Leaders

Successful leaders need to be self-aware of their strengths and abilities and skilled in communication, relationship building, and know how to bring a team together to collaborate on a shared vision and achieve the desired outcome. Together we will gain insight into why others would want to follow us. We will explore your communication style and how that style interacts with and influences others and how to flex your own communication style to get better results.

Power Talk

You find yourself sitting at a table of clerks/recorders sharing work-related experiences. What questions would you like to ask your peers? Questions related to social media, software and tools used to increase work production and efficiencies, working with elected officials, supervision and motivation strategies, records requests and records management tools, other best practices in the world of Clerkdom? We have so much to learn from one another despite our diversity. In this session, we will Power Talk about these topics and more using a roundtable format. You will gain a fresh perspective on a variety of topics; and you will walk away with a list of resources, contacts, tips and strategies to help you in your pursuit of excellence.

Keys to Supervision

Great supervision is essential to bringing out the best in the people you supervise. Supervision skills take time to be refined. In this session, we provide the basics of supervision and help you to determine ways to enhance your supervisory skills.

Self-Care and Collaboration

The amount of change and loss in the past year has been overwhelming, and employees need fresh tools for working well under the strain. This highly interactive workshop is designed to facilitate connection and awareness, and to equip teams for working well together even from remote locations.

Two topics are unpacked in this engaging workshop; Self-Care that is do-able and supported in the workplace, and Self-Awareness of four universal pain responses to high stress situations. Practical and equipping, this workshop identifies key areas where stress prevents collaboration. Engagement with these two topics increase personal ownership of health and mindset for healthy work culture.

At the end of this workshop, attendees will be able to:

Identify what stressors are contributing to Cognitive Distortions in the workplace
Choose two daily and doable ways to start practicing Self-Care to combat Compassion Fatigue.
Learn what your tendencies are to self-protect in the workplace.
Choose an action step to reorient focus for healthy workplace culture.

Approaching Human Resources Issues with Confidence

Human resources issues have become increasingly complex and can pose unforeseen challenges absent advance planning. This scenario-based training is designed to assist city and county clerks in meeting those challenges as they continue to take on expanded roles in dealing with human resources issues. Participants will work through real-life human resources case studies and then debrief about best practices. Case study topics include, but are not limited to, hiring practices, disability accommodations, incidents of discrimination and harassment, ethics, employee impairment, workplace violence, employee performance, and labor relations. Participants will gain confidence and improve their communications with their employees and peers by learning how to handle these difficult situations.

Creating your own Personal Vision Statement

After a week full of learning, we will reflect on the new concepts and principles introduced to us and determine how best to utilize our new learning when we return to the workplace. This work will be done in groups and on an individual basis, providing an opportunity to practice presentation skills with our peers.

Governance Groove: Mastering Municipal Records Management

During this course attendees will learn how to begin building a systemic approach to managing their organizations records through learning about key elements of Records Management Governance and how policies, procedures, standards, and practices help to create a framework that ensures the proper creation, maintenance, use, and disposition of government records.

Crisis Communications & Emergency Preparedness for City Clerks

City clerks and recorders are essential in maintaining government continuity and public trust during crises. This training will equip you with practical skills to communicate effectively in emergencies, support business continuity, and coordinate with emergency response teams. Through interactive discussions and crisis scenarios, participants will learn how to manage crisis communication, maintain critical city functions, and collaborate with first responders.

By the end of this training, participants will:

Understand the clerk's role in emergency response and disaster recovery.
Develop clear and effective crisis communication strategies.
Learn best practices for business continuity and public records management.
Improve coordination with first responders and city officials.
Apply knowledge through hands-on crisis scenario exercises.