The “Positive Service Culture” specialty stream of the Certificate is intended to focus on enhancing your ability to build positive, lasting relationships in the workplace within a service context. Today, every person you interact with in the workplace can be viewed as a “client”, including the person sitting right next to you. Their expectations of you and your role can be vastly diverse from your own perception. The Positive Service Culture specialty stream aims to explore dynamics of service culture in a corporate environment. The goal is to enhance your creative and critical thinking processes and to highlight the social and ethical issues of diversity in the workplace as you work toward achieving positive service outcomes, equity, and empowerment. Participants who successfully complete the PD Certificate program with the “Positive Service Culture” specialty will have improved not only their awareness of the concepts for creating an effective and positive service culture but also their confidence in applying them.

Positive Service Culture Modules
(all modules must be completed)

1. Creating a Corporate Service Culture
This course reviews the basics of corporate culture and how corporate culture impacts on customer service. Areas of study will include service environment, organizational openness, and influencing others to adopt a service culture. Participants will create a customer service culture action plan, based on identifying gaps between current and desired practices, as a project in this course.

2. Customer Service & Ethics
The subject is designed to focus on dealing with a diverse range of customers. Students will focus on topics pertaining to the achievement of equity in various social and work settings, including, but not limited to, race, gender, ethnicity and social orientations. This course will deal with social and ethical issues of diversity and will identify possible strategies for empowerment in the workplace.

3. Creative & Critical-Thinking (6 hrs; in-class)
Today more than ever, leaders need to be creative and critical thinkers in order to deal with all aspects of organizational, strategic and societal situations or environments. This course will build on the knowledge and skills covered in the previous courses. You will learn how to think creatively and critically in order to apply those skills to roles in the organization, and professional and personal situations. These skills will assist with analyzing information in order to respond to a wide variety of work and personal situations.

Participants will learn to:

• Define creative and critical thinking in relation to business and the role of a leader.
• Compare and contrast creative and critical thinking.
• Explain the difference between thinking and knowing and the implication to business operations.
• Assess your creative and critical thinking skills.
• Apply creative and critical thinking to a specific workplace situation or problem.
• Develop strategies to improve creative and critical thinking skills for an individual or a team.