'Got Your Back' Business Workshop

'Got Your Back' Business Workshop

Date: April 26, 2022

Time: 9 am to 5:30 pm at The Paper Mill Lounge (Pavilion) in downtown Sylva

Registration Fee: $20.00. Once you register, you will be emailed with payment options. Registration secures your spot. Payment can be made online with credit card or at the door with cash or check for $20.

Brought to you by industry experts, employers and partners, the "Got Your Back" event is an interactive day full of workshops, information sharing, learning and networking that will help you elevate your work environment and create a place where employees will thrive and managers can compete for the best talent. Participants who attend the full day will receive some awesome "swag bags" and also earn recognition as a "Got Your Back" business, which will put you at the top of every job seekers list, elevate your brand and differentiate you from the competition...

Welcome: (9:00-9:15) Get your backpacks ready to fill with tools to support your employees in their development while improving their commitment to your business.

Session 1: Turning a Job Into a Career- 9:15-10:00 (Tonya Snider)

Even though industries like service and retail are largely thought to employ young people on a short-term basis, many employees today are hungry for a more stable and long-term approach. The goal of this workshop is to equip owners with strategies which will help show that your business cares about employee longevity and stability. Some of the topics you will learn about include structuring pay increases over time, defining performance expectations, providing affordable benefits options, and methods for developing employee skills in meaningful ways. There will also be time included for business owners to creatively think about how these strategies would be best implemented in the context of your specific businesses.

Session 2: Hold on to Your People- 10:05-10:50 (Annie Wilson)

We know from studying employee retention that the factors which affect it are complex. Still, that same data shows that the strategies we use to address this issue don’t have to be nearly as complicated. The aim of this workshop is to provide simple, economically-feasible ways for bridging the gap between employer and employee so that mutual understanding can blossom. Topics covered will include big ones like understanding employee motivation, how to improve job satisfaction, and the role of organizational commitment. Additionally, a workshop will be featured where business owners get to create an employee contract, which can be used for things such as setting mutual expectations and evaluating performance over time.

Session 3: Finding the Best Employees- 10:55-11:35 (Daniel McCord)

If your business is a collaborative journey, then you want to make sure your companions are a good fit. In order to help you identify good potential candidates, this workshop will give guidance on the whole hiring process. Topics covered will include how to effectively advertise open positions, different assessment strategies for picking the best candidate, and planning for future personnel needs. There will additionally be a discussion on legal issues you might want to consider when hiring.

Session 4: The Truth About Leadership- 11:40-12:25 (Hannah Randall)

Leadership is one of those business topics that is both fairly straight-forward and yet still largely misunderstood. By attending this workshop, you’ll be equipped with up-to-date leadership practices which have been empirically shown to improve organizational cohesion and efficiency. Time will also be spent dispelling popular misconceptions still floating around about what effective leadership looks like. Whether you are a curious long-time business owner or you are new to the challenge of leading, this session will serve to teach you actionable strategies and handy concepts.

Lunch and Networking- 12:30-2:00

Session 5: Promoting Equity at Work- 2:00-2:45 (Sharon Oxendine)

Nobody wants to feel stuck by themselves or as if they are in the wrong place, and yet this is what happens when we do not take an active approach to diversity, inclusion, and equity. The purpose of this workshop is to help illuminate the ways organizations can make their own members feel excluded. Through evidence-based models and strategies, you will learn about things like different systems of justice in the workplace as well as what concepts like equality, equity, and implicit bias really look like in practice.

Session 6: Training Your Team Better- 2:50-3:35 (Sarah Benoit)

From evaluating training needs, designing effective training programs, to evaluating training success, this session will guide you down the trail of employee training from beginning to end. This workshop will tackle the subject by providing methods which, once again, are supported by modern empirical data and have been shown to work across a variety of industries.

Session 7: Workplace Culture- 3:40-4:25 (Sarah Brown)

Workplace culture is the stuff that binds your organization together. Knowing this, it’s important for business owners and leaders to be aware of the impact workplace culture can have, as well as what you can do to steer it in a good direction. This workshop will focus mainly on the concept of workplace climate, which describes how your business handles ethical issues at different levels of organization. You will learn about how different ethical climates might be more appropriate at different stages of your business, as well as how an ethical climate can be used for things like decreasing employee silence and increasing feelings of organizational support. There will be time for business owners to reflect on their current business climate and come up with ways they might improve it.

Session 8: Employee Performance Evaluations- 4:30-5:15 (Annie Wilson)

Learning is something that everyone does on their own constantly, but actual growth is something that requires feedback. Whether you want your employees to stay on track or you want them to improve, this workshop is all about sharing effective employee evaluation practices. This session is a deeper dive into topics also covered in the core workshop about employee retention. There will very much be a focus on letting business owners create employee contracts that are best suited to their individual business.

Closing Remarks: 5:15-5:30 (Tonya Snider and Annie Wilson)

This event is a first of its kind and is sponsored by the CREATE BRIDGES project that serves Jackson, Macon, Swain, Cherokee, Clay and Graham counties.