Your organization is only as strong as your people. To be successful, your professionals must take care of their team, their task, their customer, and themselves. In recent decades, much of our work has been automated. In fact, this automation replaces many of the hard skills – knowledge and technical abilities – that once made the difference with your competitors. Investing in the development of soft skills is therefore more important than ever.
The Right Soft Skills Make an Impact
Soft skills are a professional’s ability to cooperate, plan work, adapt to circumstances and deal with stress. These skills contribute to overall job performance and are highly valued by employers. Within organizations, they are gaining more attention, but the problem remains that they are intangible and difficult to measure. This means insight into the performance of individual professionals is often lacking and business cases for investments are unclear. A factual approach that relates Soft Skills training to organizational goals and allows for measurement of professionals’ individual performances, provides a solution.
“People overestimate their communication skills and underestimate the impact of this”
Developing Soft Skills into Key Qualities
Employees with the right soft skills are a main resource of your business. Companies often focus on a sleek website or well-thought-out marketing campaign, while skilled professionals determine the success of your business in the long term. They work to optimize internal processes and increase the ability of your organization to efficiently solve problems and customer challenges. Beside the fact that they have become the key qualities of professionals, we see four important reasons to invest in the soft skills of your employees.
1) Soft skills are not ‘soft’, but essential for any organization to thrive
Organizations work because people work together. Collaboration is partly about exchanging information, which computers can also do. In addition, collaboration is about determining direction, which computers cannot do, and bringing each other into action, which only people can do together. By professionals making a joint effort and exchanging information about what works and what does not, an organization can flexibly respond to opportunities and threats that define the future of the market.
2) Employees without challenges become blunted
Professionals are learning people who derive their job pleasure from challenges. When people are not challenged, they look for challenges elsewhere. Their focus wanders away from your organizational goals. Goal-oriented soft skills training means focusing your professional’s attention on where they can do better and challenging them to achieve goals.
3) Organizations must be able to respond faster to customers
In a world where efficiency has become a key differentiator, where customers easily find alternatives, customer intimacy and a smooth process are essential, including awareness of customer needs is essential. This means building relationships and listening to needs in customer journeys. To then efficiently translate this into your internal processes and employee journeys.
4) “The Solution to Most Challenges Lies Within the Organization Itself”
Information is becoming increasingly easy to find, but in a tight labor market the contrary is true for people. Engaged professionals are the backbone of your organization and so is a company atmosphere that people want to be part of. To build an inspiring organization and culture it’s important to know that the solution to most challenges exist within the organization itself. It’s the potential of your team for engagement and exchanging ideas and skills. Unleashing this resource requires a positive work environment where collaboration is sought after and conflicts are resolved. Therefore, “soft” skills are “core” skills for unlocking all other expertise.
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