Soft-Skills-as-a-part-of-workplace-learning

According to a study by MIT Sloan, a controlled 12-month soft skills training trial in five separate factories delivered a 250 percent ROI in just eight months. Their soft-skills training, such as problem-solving and decision-making, increased productivity, increased the efficiency of complex activities, and improved employee attendance. In fact, mastery of soft skills accounts for 75 percent of long-term employment performance, while technical skills account for only 25% of career success.

Again, there are four trends that are transforming your workplace. They are soft skills (91%), work flexibility (72%), anti-harassment (71%), and pay transparency (53%).

soft skills training
Source: trvst.world

As you can see, soft skills training yields tremendous benefits. When it comes to hiring, hard skills are at the top of the list for many companies. That is, they will look for job-specific talents and the training or experience required to do the work properly. While suitable education, training, and work experience are critical, you should also examine less tangible qualities such as soft skills. After all, having the most brilliant and qualified personnel isn’t enough. It’s about their ability to collaborate as a team to benefit their personal and the company’s success.

The Definition of Soft Skills
soft skills training

Rather than being dependent on degrees, technical skills, or practical experience, soft talents are more personality-focused. People skills, social skills, interpersonal skills, and transferable abilities are all included.

Hard skills, on the other hand, are technical talents that are typically job-specific. They can be taught, assessed, and tested through tests, practical assignments, or quizzes, and they come from certification programs, employee training, and job experience.

On the other hand, soft skills are more concerned with interpersonal connections and include conflict resolution, communication, listening, and problem-solving.

What Are The Benefits of Soft Skills Training?

Communication, conflict resolution, and issue solving skills are essential in practically every aspect of corporate operations. Soft skills training are critical for obtaining new clients, increasing customer service metrics, and developing a stronger team dynamic across your organization in every business unit and employee job.

Soft skills training programs include a slew of other organizational benefits, but here are some of the most important:

Improve the customer service experience

This is perhaps the most evident advantage of enhancing soft skills training in the workplace. Your staff will be able to more effectively listen to determine your clients’ wants, identify problems, and assist them in resolving them. They are also more likely to have more compassion and empathy due to improving soft skills, which can have a big impact on customer service.

Boost your sales

Improving your sales team’s soft skills via skill training might help them during the negotiation process. Sales reps can use their skills to connect with clients more personally while maintaining the necessary professional boundaries, which your consumers will enjoy. The sale will happen automatically when staff spends extra time addressing your clients’ pain issues and connecting them with the correct solution.

Enhance employee retention

Because you invested in their professional development through soft skills training, your company will be able to retain more talent. You’ll save money by decreasing the need to hire and train substitute employees. Soft skills also aid knowledge retention and empower employees to take charge of their own personal growth.

Hone communication effectiveness

Your personnel will be able to communicate more successfully with one another and your clients or customers after attending skill training sessions. You’ll teach them how to communicate more clearly, listen more intently, and handle uncomfortable conversations.

Improve leadership skills

Following an informative skill training session, your staff will be more capable of delegating, providing, accepting feedback, taking responsibility, and motivating themselves and others to achieve their goals.

Polish problem-solving abilities

When it comes to spotting difficulties and potential impediments to projects, tasks, and goals, your employees will be proactive. With skill training, they’ll also be able to discover and implement solutions and suggest alternative solutions.

Improve critical and creative thinking

Your staff can “think outside the box” creatively and critically if you provide soft skills training. They will weigh their options and make educated judgments using these abilities, increasing their chances of achieving the intended results.

Increase teamwork, efficiency, and productivity

Soft skill training enables your staff to collaborate and work together to achieve the company’s goals and objectives as a whole. As a result, there is an increase in efficiency and productivity.

Soft Skills That Are Necessary For Your Firm
soft skill development
Leadership

Employees, via skill training, will be better able to delegate, provide, and accept honest and actionable criticism, take ownership of their own deliverables, and encourage themselves and others to meet business targets and KPIs due to leadership upskilling.

Communication

Your personnel will be better able to communicate with one another and your consumers, which is a win-win situation. You’ll be empowering them to express themselves more clearly, listen more actively and carefully during calls (telephone etiquette), and achieve better outcomes from tough conversations if you improve their communication skills.

Teamwork

Skill training encourages good employee connections and empowers your coworkers to interact and work as a team to achieve your company’s objectives, targets, and KPIs.

Time management

Improving time management via skill training allows your staff to accomplish their work objectives more quickly. As a result of this process, efficiency and production are improved.

Resolving issues

When it comes to identifying difficulties and potential impediments to projects, tasks, and goals, your employees will be more proactive. With the help of skill training, they’ll also be better able to recognize and implement solutions and develop alternate ones.

Business writing

We’ve all heard horror stories of highly educated candidates who failed to spell and do a grammar check on their CVs before applying for a job. Simple mistakes aren’t limited to the recruitment stage; many businesses suffer from a lack of good writing abilities.

The stronger your writing skills, from emails to business cases to client proposals, the better the impression you’ll create on the people around you, including your employer, colleagues, and clients.

Influencing and persuading

Three fundamental personal characteristics significantly impact our ability to influence and persuade others. For some, this daily challenge is often just out of grasp.

We can all enhance our success rates in this area by increasing our confidence and ability in abilities such as empathy, listening during calls (telephone etiquette) or conversations, and rapport building.

Public speaking

Glossophobia is a fear of speaking in public that affects many professions. Some people make public speaking look effortless, while others make it look like a disaster.

Negotiation

The expression ‘the art of the transaction’ has gained popularity in recent years. It makes negotiation sound like an esoteric skill only a select few can master.

In reality, many occupations necessitate strong negotiation abilities. Every negotiation begins with careful planning, follows a predictable pattern, and is based on mutual understanding, empathy, careful communication during calls and conversations (telephone etiquette), and compromise.

Giving and receiving feedback

Appraising, reviewing, and improving performance successfully is critical to managing and developing people.

If done incorrectly, it can ruin a much-needed culture of mutual trust between those who provide criticism and those who receive it.

Conflict resolution

It’s impossible to expect two individuals to agree on everything all the time. Because disagreements in relationships are unavoidable, learning to cope with them healthily is essential.

How many employees in your office have the necessary skills and expertise to resolve a conflict — suppose during a call (telephone etiquette)? How much more useful would this soft talent be to your company if more individuals had it?

The problem is that many people still regard these abilities as innate rather than learned; they believe that one is either born with them or without them. Fortunately, this is not the case, as all in-demand soft talents can be learned and improved.

Telephone etiquette

What is telephone etiquette? Well, when was the last time you had to call a help desk yourself? Did you think that the person or individuals you spoke to displayed an attitude and behavior which impacted how you perceived the business, its levels of service, or both? The same is true for you, then. And this is called telephone etiquette.

The telephone etiquette your customer-facing teams display before clients during each call they place or answer at the office will affect how consumers view your business. Soft skills training like telephone etiquette will ensure that your teams are up to the task.

The Best Ways to Teach Soft Skills to Your Employees
soft skills topics

You can deliver soft skills training in a variety of ways to your team. You can create entirely new courses dedicated to soft skills or incorporate pertinent soft skill portions into existing courses. Consider some of the alternatives listed below when it comes to distribution methods:

Coaching aka mentoring

Suppose you have an employee who needs to improve a specific soft talent, such as leadership or telephone etiquette. In that case, you may want to consider bringing in a mentor or coach and tailoring a learning method that is specialized and targeted. Coaching usually entails working with the individual to identify, target, and prepare for improved performance in the workplace.

In this section, a coach defines the employee’s goals, existing skill sets, strengths, and weaknesses. After that, they develop a development strategy and show the student how to close the gaps. When an employee is on their path to implementing this plan, a trainer can support them and provide actionable feedback.

Live, engaging, interactive workshops

You can plan live workshops to train a whole group of employees in a specific soft skill like telephone etiquette. The greatest workshops have a clear, action-oriented goal and are designed to address current issues in the industry.

Assume you wish to teach your customer service representatives how to resolve client disagreements in a call (telephone etiquette). Role-play situations can be devised and acted outright in the workshop.

Make a disgruntled customer out of your supervisor or learning and development representative. Your staff will have to try to resolve the dispute via a call, thereby mastering the skill of telephone etiquette. The trainer will bridge skill gaps and steer them in the proper direction based on their responses.

Learning through social interaction

Learning with others is another excellent and straightforward technique to acquire soft skills like telephone etiquette. According to studies, there is a strong correlation between having fun at work and informal learning. You can take advantage of this by establishing work streams or small-scale projects that demand collaboration among coworkers. You can also utilize social applications and other technologies to engage in social learning online.

You can start a peer forum where employees can talk about improving their soft skills in the workplace and how to reach their full potential. They’ll have a spot to ask questions and share tales to gain feedback from their peers.

eLearning

In today’s world, it makes sense to train your employees online. They can develop soft skills like telephone etiquette while training on any device at home or wherever.

You can purchase pre-made soft skills courses through online learning platforms. How will your staff, on the other hand, put their newly learned talents into practice? And how will you ensure that your coworkers actually learned something from the training?

Dialogue simulation is an excellent technique to solve these difficulties while providing valuable online soft skills training. It’s ideal for imparting business communication skills like telephone etiquette and other related abilities.

A dialogue simulation is an online interaction mimics a real-life conversation with a person, such as a customer, a coworker, or a stakeholder. Sims are comparable to role-playing games in that they are automated and do not require the participation of other individuals.

The most important thing is that they can assist employees in developing communication skills like telephone etiquette while posing no risk to the company until they are ready to put them to the test in the real world. Furthermore, unlike live classes, there is no need to collect all participants in one location and devote a significant amount of time to individual practice. Dialogue simulations enable dozens, if not hundreds, of professionals to practice whenever and wherever they want.

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Augmented and virtual reality

Using augmented and virtual reality, employees’ soft skills like telephone etiquette can be developed very effectively. These tools enable businesses to effectively recreate real-life events that employees may encounter and train them to respond in those instances.

For example, in a virtual world, you can simulate circumstances in which an employee must empathize with a coworker who is having personal difficulties. You can also act out a scenario in which management must provide critical feedback to their employees via a call — again, telephone etiquette.

How to Create an Effective Soft Skills Training Program Online?

You may be wondering how to receive a soft skills training course online quickly and easily, so let’s have a look at a simple step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Complete any necessary preliminary work

This step will vary depending on the technique and software you’re using, but in general, you’ll want to outline your learning objectives and what should be covered in the course at this point. Also, select how you’ll bring your concept to life, such as which authoring tool you’ll employ.

Step 2: Design a course

This step will be determined by the type of training courses you wish to produce and the software tool you select. Slide-based courses, quizzes, video tutorials, and dialogue simulations are easily created with rapid eLearning creation tools like PlayAblo.

Step 3: Launch the course

After you’ve done building your soft skills course, you’ll need to decide how to share and promote it. Most businesses choose to deliver training using an LMS, which allows for easy tracking of results and completions and the ability to use any eLearning format. You can, however, post your course on your company’s website or intranet.

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Last Thoughts

This finishes our examination of soft skills training. Is it possible for your company to provide soft skill training to its employees? If that’s the case, how do you offer the training, and how beneficial has it been? We’d love to hear what you have to say in the comments section.

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