FIS Community Classroom

Some of you may have seen that we recently launched FIS Community Classroom where we are offering free leadership and wellbeing training courses to non-profits and community organizations.

I wanted to share a little bit about how this came about.

My company, FIS, successfully moved approximately 95% of its global workforce to a work-from-home environment over the past few months while providing a wide range of enabling technologies and innovative wellness, training and care development programs for its employees. As one of the areas I look after is Global Learning at the company, our team were intimately involved in putting together the development offerings. And we have been getting great feedback, and running up waiting lists for the training we were offering.

An employee contacted our head of learning, Tracey Corlett, to say they loved one of our webinars so much they wanted to share it with their partner who worked in a community based organization in the UK. And that got us thinking…. Why not take it a step further and offer our learning for free to all not-for-profit organisations?

I had been reading all about the significant pressures on charities mounting and with the need to cut back on operational spend, budgets are being put under immense pressure. More than half of charitable organizations in the United States are expecting to raise less money in 2020 than they did in 2019, and an equal percentage believe the same will occur in 2021, according to the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ (AFP) Coronavirus Response Survey. This pattern is repeated across the globe. Given the mounting pressures on voluntary sector organizations to do more for less, spending on staff training can be a real stretch for charities. Training programs cost money, and some not-for-profits may not have funding for employee development.

 We have learned a lot about how to equip, enable and support a highly productive global workforce over the past six months, and this seemed like a great opportunity to pass on some of our learnings and best practices to assist those that have been hard hit by this pandemic. So along with some of our great colleagues across FIS we put together the ‘FIS Community Classroom’ – taking our training out to the not-for-profits. FIS has a long history of corporate citizenship and I am so proud that we now have another way we can give back and help communities thrive.

The full list of scheduled sessions for 2020 is as follows:

? Leading self in uncertain times – 8 a.m. ET, Sept 25

Explores the challenges of a Virtual, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (VUCA) world and ways in which non-profit organizations can understand employees’ capacity for change and build resilience. 

? Achieving your goals with Strengths – 8 a.m. ET, Oct 30

Introduces organizations to the benefits of a strengths-based workforce management philosophy and best practices in implementing this approach in support of organizational goals.

 ?  Thriving remotely – 8am ET, Dec 4

Provides tips and strategies for building a workforce that thrives in a remote model.

To find out more, visit https://empower1.fisglobal.com/fis-community-classroom.html. 

And please pass this onto any contacts you have at any community based or not for profit organisations. As we go forward we hope to evolve the offering further and continue bringing these learnings to the not-for-profit sector. If you have an idea for a topic, let us know and we will see if we can work it into our schedule.

Finally a big thanks to the many collaborators on this project – as we know, it takes a village!