We come across many individuals in our everyday life where some have a keen sense of listening, while some communicate smoothly without any hesitation to strangers and there are many who are great organizers. Also, workplace soft skills such as the ability to work as a team, leadership skills, social grace and language skills are desirable qualities that are any employer’s delight. All these traits are soft skills.
Let us understand what soft skills training entails:
1. Establish a learning attitude
A good method to make your workforce change-ready is by pushing them to develop soft skills such as flexibility, emotional intelligence, and sharpness. Explaining employees the importance of soft skills required in the workplace is a way of engaging them to undertake soft skill training programs provided by the company.
A realization that soft skills can be mastered by practice will boost their performance at work. Help them understand essential workplace soft skills such as listening intently, response techniques etc. can have a great impact on their employee experience.
2. Boost self-reflection
It’s very important to understand the kind of training each employee needs before you hand out training plans. To do this each employee needs to reflect on his/her soft skills and figure out which are their strengths or the areas they need to work on by being truthful to themselves.
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3. Broaden awareness and perception
Understanding why soft skills development is an important aspect of personal growth of any employee. Training programs and seminars can help in providing a push to the employees so that they can work on their soft skills development by being more communicative and positive.
Online soft skills development programs are a great way of tapping the millennial workforce into using the learning management system (LMS) which is proving to be useful and fun at the same time.
4. Giving weightage to LMS software
By introducing LMS employees can log in from anywhere and use the software to enhance their soft skills. This is helping larger organizations whose efforts to maintain a good soft skills development program seemed impossible now become a reality.
5. Give space to practice
“Practice makes man perfect” – this age old saying comes to mind when we think about providing opportunities for the staff to practice their soft skills.
A company organized retreat helps in providing a safe environment to practice soft skills such as teamwork, problem solving and communication.
The LMS comes with simulations for employees to easily practice their employee situations by using the soft skills they learned.
6. Give feedback
Giving feedback to employees regarding their growth in terms of development of soft skills is of great importance to help them reach their desired professional goals.
Development of soft skills not only changes the habits of the employees but also affects their personality. Hence, it can be perceived to be quite slow. Making sure that you guide your employees into the correct and sustainable employee development program is required.
References:
- Daniel Goleman, Harvard Business Review, 2004: “What Makes a Leader?”
- Eleni Zoe, 10 September 2019: “Soft skills in the workplace: How to develop them and why should you care?”
