Safety: It’s Not About the Chances You Take, But the Decisions You Make. Part 1

Safety Speaker Mike Hourigan
In this three-part series, Safety Speaker Mike Hourigan will be examining everyday decisions that affect workplace safety. Part 1: Workplace safety isn't solely about making sure the right tools and protective gear are on hand and staying compliant with all regulatory and organization-wide compliance procedures. Making sure that people are safe at work also isn't limited to workplaces with highly physical aspects and their subsequent regulations like construction sites and restaurants. Managers...
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Negotiation Doesn’t Come Naturally…

Negotiation Skills Speaker Mike Hourigan
...to a lot of people, that is. Having difficulty with negotiations certainly doesn't mean that you or your employees aren't intelligent, capable, or good people. Many people who face challenges when it comes to negotiation often place the blame on shyness and being introverted, or simply disliking confrontation and preferring an easy and agreeable way out of a sticky situation. Which are definitely good reasons one may find themselves being...
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Are Team-Building Efforts Overrated Attempts at Getting People to Do More?

Keynote and Safety Speaker Mike Hourigan
Teams are the heartbeat of an organization. Team Building Managers are always looking for ways to get teams to work more harmoniously together and improve the quality of the teamwork at play so that the organization can become more effective. So, it's common for them to invest in team-building activities and retreats so that employees can learn how to work better together. But let's face it: "teamwork" and "team-building"...
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Do You Need a Millennial Speaker or a Communication Skills Speaker?

Millennial Speaker Mike Hourigan
When looking for a Millennial Keynote speaker, especially if you have a Millennial audience in mind, you need to ask yourself what you're really looking to get out of hiring a speaker. Is the problem you're currently facing with your employees about a lack of willingness to understand each other's generation, or is the problem about being unable to effectively communicate? Many experts agree that Millennials are genuinely lacking in...
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Safety Speaker Talks About Communication Skills

Safety Speaker Mike Hourigan
Workplace safety is of utmost importance when you're dealing with dangerous chemicals in labs or raw materials likely to hurt people on construction sites. There's federal and state regulations to comply with along with additional safety protocols set by management. But safety isn't just about adhering to laws and making sure that your employees are paying attention when operating heavy machinery. It's about creating a culture of workplace safety...
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Safety Speaker on Listening Skills Training

Safety Training Speaker Mike Hourigan
Good communication may be paramount to understanding and absorbing the safety message. But what's also incredibly important for good communication skills is being a good listener. When it comes to workplace safety in particular, people may think about physical protections like PPE and hard hats. But while those things are designed to protect your body from the harm that equipment can inflict, they don't develop or protect one's ability...
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Tourism Speaker on Negotiation Skills

Travel Tourism Speaker Mike Hourigan
The two fields don't quite sound related: tourism and learning how to become a better negotiator. But actually, they have more intersection than you'd think! First off, travel sites are coming up like weeds nowadays. There's stalwarts in the industry but now you also got all these smaller nicheourism companies out there. How are you going to negotiate competitive deals and loyalty when most travelers can look up the...
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Negotiation Skills Training for Sales People

Negotiation Skills Training Speaker Mike Hourigan
A lot of things may have changed about sales and managing a sales team in the 21st century. But there's one thing that definitely hasn't changed: negotiation skills are so crucial for your sales people because 70% of purchase decisions are now made well before any contact with a salesperson is made. People are doing their research online, asking friends and family on social media about your products and...
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What Millennials Would Like a Millennial Speaker to Tell the Audience

How a Millennial Speaker can help with your Multi Generational Workforce Millennials are often scapegoated for a lot of society's problems. While this generation genuinely faces major shortcomings in soft skills thanks to the over-emphasis on technical proficiency in their education, their hard work and new perspectives often go unnoticed. Intergenerational communication breakdowns between Boomers and Millennials are a daily problem for most people and the workplace is certainly...
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Safety Speaker Mike Hourigan

Virtual Keynote Speaker Mike Hourigan
What a Safety Speaker Wants You to Know: It's About the Names, Not the Numbers Let's be honest: safety regulations aren't exactly the most exciting topic. Whether your audience wears hard hats or only marginally comes into contact with dangerous substances working in an office, they don't want to have their work interrupted just to sit through a long presentation on statutes that got updated. A workplace safety speaker...
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Tourism Speaker on Change

Tourism Speaker Mike Hourigan
What a Tourism Speaker Can Tell You About Change It's just a fact of life that everything changes. Some of this change can be slow and happen over time to the point that you barely notice it, and other times it's sudden and right in your face. And no one knows change better than the tourism industry. Sure, you still see ads for the same types of cruises, resort...
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Soft Skills Training for Millennials

Soft Skills Training for Millennials
Do Millennials really need soft skills training? It's been said countless times over: Millennials are sorely lacking in soft skills. Millennials primary and postsecondary education has been drastically different in many ways from that of previous generations. More emphasis is placed on how Millennials develop hard skills that can be easily measured. It might be with a certificate, degree, or perhaps their own project such as a blog or...
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Safety Training Speaker Mike Hourigan

Workplace Safety Speaker Mike Hourigan
Having both a culture that prioritizes workplace safety and a literal safe workplace are very important. Safety skills training is an important investment in insuring that every work environment from factory floors and design studios has the lowest likelihood of grievous injuries and stressful or compromising professional relationships. But an unfortunate truth is that safety regulations and procedures aren't exactly the most thrilling topic, and your employees aren't going to...
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Millennial Speaker – Generational Keynote Speaker

Millennial Keynote Speaker
  Teaching Your Sales Team How to Sell Without the Feeling of Being Sold To When it comes to training and motivating your sales team, those darn Millennials are at it again. There’s sales methods that older than dirt which entail the finer nuances of observation and communication, many of which are still widely employed today, but the times are changing. In fact, times are not just changing but changing...
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How to Motivate Your Millennial Sales Team

Millennial Keynote Speaker Mike Hourigan
It’s no secret that Millennials, despite all of the flack they receive from older generations, have a great deal of untapped salesmanship potential that likely hasn’t been nurtured yet. Millennials have a lot of technical knowledge but not enough soft skills and in facing tough financial and job markets, they also weren’t really taught how to negotiate. The potential is there but it needs to be brought forth.
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Change Management isn’t always about Change Management

Change Management Speaker
It may sound redundant, but it’s true. A simple fact of life is that people change. While change management is a holistic and long-term strategy of preparing teams and other stakeholders for change and guiding them through the challenges arising from it, sometimes a change management strategy just isn’t solely about organization-wide change management itself. It’s about people’s reaction to change. How people themselves also change over time. Culture...
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Common Mistakes when hiring a Keynote Speaker

Keynote Speaker Mike Hourigan
  Common Mistakes in Hiring a Keynote Speaker You need a great keynote speaker for your event and in all the hoopla leading up to it, you might be getting overwhelmed. As a result, you can end up making some mistakes when choosing a keynote speaker: this can cause your meeting to totally flat flat, or other aspects of your event can go wrong. Here are some common mistakes...
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