Workplace stress and longer hours have rarely been more prominent. Whether you are at the office or working from home, the constant emails, Zoom calls, and other communications unrestrained by time and distance can be overwhelming—and all the more so if you’re working at home with children.

Purdue University’s online master’s degree in Corporate Training and Communication equips professionals charged with communicating and leading training efforts in various organizations and contexts.

Organization leaders need to think about communication and training strategies for addressing employee well-being and the new remote or hybrid workplace structures that have become prominent with the pandemic. Communication needs to be empathetic, build resilience, offer steps to manage stress, and provide employee resources for assistance. Moreover, leading in this new environment also means making provision for the training needs that must be filled to reach organization goals.

How leaders communicate and train their employees during and after the pandemic can deeply affect employee morale and the trajectory of an organization. With sudden displacement from normal environments, anxiety about the present and future tends to breed.

During such times of change, a leader’s words and actions can help calm nerves and ease the adjustment to new ways of working while keeping the organization moving onward and upward.

“High-performance organizations know that their employees are their most valuable asset. If employees are uninformed and unprepared to help meet organizational goals, the organization is unprepared too. Effective internal corporate communication, employee training initiatives, and information technologies that are strategically aligned simply work better,” says Bart Collins, director of the graduate program in Purdue’s Brian Lamb School of Communication.

The good news is that fundamental strategies of effective training and communication work. Purdue University’s 100 percent online master’s degree in Corporate Training and Communication is designed for industry professionals seeking to benefit their organizations through enhanced training and communication focused on improving workplace effectiveness. Purdue’s faculty have industry experience that allows them to infuse practical knowledge into the curriculum through hands-on projects and use cases featuring real-life scenarios.

With the onset of the pandemic, leaders had to write a new playbook overnight and were immediately judged (sometimes unfairly) on how they communicated and implemented it. Now, the opportunity exists to apply lessons learned, along with a wealth of research and best practices, to building a foundation of organizational resilience that can transform potentially disruptive situations in positive ways, whether it is a pandemic, changes in the economy, changes in the marketplace, or other changes affecting an organization. Effective training and communications are integral to doing this.