What Are Soft Skills?
Soft skills allow us to connect with other people. For example, communication is a crucial soft skill. This ability may not be as easy to test as “hard skills” like mathematics or programming, but communication is essential to a functioning workplace.
When you bring an employee in for an interview, your company is often evaluating their soft skills. Can they stay positive during a stressful situation? Can they arrive on-time and fully prepared? Do they respond well to unexpected changes? Are they friendly and confident?
Improve Employee Soft Skills In Your Workplace
As you design an online training program for your business with LearningZen, you should consider how your courses can help employees hone their soft skills. Here are a few abilities that are worth emphasizing:
Communication
Experienced communicators can resolve conflicts, empathize with their peers, and ensure that customers feel heard and respected. They understand when to listen and when to speak. To foster better communication in your workplace, use online training courses with branching scenarios where employees can practice responding to different situations.
Teamwork
It is essential that your employees are can get along with each other and work together to achieve a common goal. They must be ready to lead or to follow, as the situation demands. You can cultivate better teamwork with online group projects.
Problem-Solving
To solve problems, we must unpack a situation, find the underlying causes, experiment with different solutions, and remain calm until the right answer is found. Your employees can develop stronger problem-solving skills through “serious games,” which teach via immersive storylines, compelling characters, and point systems.
Ownership
Employees cannot learn from their mistakes unless they take ownership of them, and a hidden mistake can lead to a more significant problem down the road. Still, it is difficult to be transparent and possibly face blame. One way to improve ownership in your workplace is to ask employees to point out the mistakes that a character makes in a scenario.
Time Management
Job productivity is largely determined by your employees’ abilities to meet deadlines, stay on-task, and set priorities. To improve these time management skills, encourage them to create a plan for their online training process, with clear deadlines for reaching important milestones.
Which Soft Skills Do You Want to Emphasize?
Squeezing every soft skill into one training course will lead to lackluster results. Instead, you should put together smaller, more targeted courses to help employees better retain what they’ve learned. To start designing your online soft skills training courses with LearningZen, please contact us today!
