Canadian HR Reporter

www.hrreporter.com 31 challenges of the immediate. They worked with urgency to keep HR professionals informed in the face of an ongoing crisis. Now, as organizations try to survive in our "new normal" of remote work, social distancing, uncertainty and change, the IRC is deepening its educational opportunities to meet those challenges. It is building on its strengths in change management education and integrating them with lessons learned in the first months of the pandemic. The IRC is offering a suite of programs that show HR professionals that continuing education is key right now because of, not despite, the crisis. "Managing and dealing with the substantial waves of changes during a pandemic could be broken down into four Rs: react, respond, rebuild and reinvent," says Noël. "Now, we're out of the react and respond zone for the most part. As we move into the rebuild and reinvent stages, we have to design our organizations for increased flexibiliy and resilency. Because there's been so much change so quickly, HR leaders are asking how they can diagnose the challenges ahead and start to design the right solutions going forward. We've built our foundational programs to give them those skills." The Labour Relations Foundations program is one of the two hybridized online/in-person offerings the IRC plans to launch in the fall. It will be taught with some participants physically present and socially distanced and others attending remotely. Labour Relations Foundations will cover a buffet of key skills such as conflict handling, fact finding, ensuring HR leaders can manage change effectively is not a discretionary spend, says Juniper. Change management has been woven into the fabric of Queen's IRC, he says. It's something that serves middle managers especially well as they feel squeezed by changes that may cost them their jobs. For those key people, learning to get ahead of changes and manage shocks as they come can ripple out throughout the organization, reducing overall anxiety and giving a better sense of overall preparedness. "My organization is essential, so we never stopped running," says Melanie Winter, the organizational development advisor for hygiene and tissue manufacturer Cascades Inc. and a past participant of several Queen's IRC programs. "The ability to pivot quickly was vital because we didn't even have time to stop and shut things down, we had to figure it all out on the fly." With word coming down from governments daily, employees voicing a range of concerns and demand for hygiene products at a panic-driven high, Winter had to rely on the change management skills she honed at the IRC. She says that, through her education, she learned to manage change through a human lens and could ensure that every part of the organization was able to react and cope well with the huge stresses they faced. "The lessons I learned were really important not just to make the changes so the business could keep running," she says. "We could make the changes that kept the business running safely, where the employees felt heard, they felt safe and they felt taken care of." CHRR grievance handling, collective bargaining and change management, which has become so crucial in our current time. The second course, says Noël, was selected because it touches on a theme she's been hearing about constantly over the past 90 days: trust. The IRC's Building Trust in the Workplace program has been retooled to meet the demands of workforces and HR leaders unsure of how trust can be built in the long term and now with an increase in remote work. Trust was a deeply difficult concept to define and build before the pandemic. Now, says Noël, there's a need to understand what trust means in our current era and build upon it. While the IRC is stepping up its educational offerings to meet the times, a past director and a former participant of the centre agree that HR leaders should invest in developing new skills. Even as the crisis keeps HR leaders stuck in the day-to-day, they say a look at the bigger picture is crucial. "Historically, when times get tough, learning and development is the first [aspect of HR work that] gets cut," says Paul Juniper, former director of the IRC and a veteran HR director with more than 30 years of front-line experience. "In this environment that we're in now, I think that's proving entirely the wrong thing to do." As organizations face comple tely different circumstances, they need their teams and their HR professionals to wield the most up-to-date skills possible to manage a state of ongoing change, he says. Even in an environment of strained resources, Melanie Winter Paul Juniper Stephanie Noël

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