Benefits of soft skills training for workplace development are revealed by research.

What allows a productive team to function as a unit? How can groups establish trust? How do you keep a project moving forward? What kind of communication happens when an organization changes?

Soft skills are the foundation of an effective company and are crucial to the responses to those questions. This post will define soft talents, explain their value, and provide advice on how to foster their development inside your company.

What Are Soft Skills?

Without being precisely defined, the majority of individuals have a rough understanding of what soft talents are. To put it simply, technical skills are quite specialized to a work function, whereas soft skills are those that may be used to any capacity. Interpersonal skills, people skills, and transferable talents are other terms for soft skills.

Soft skill examples are as follows:

• written and verbal communication
• time management
• teamwork
• critical thinking
• emotional intelligence
• mindfulness
• adaptability

The Importance of Soft Skills

It diminishes their significance to refer to them as “soft skills.”

Any effective team is held together by its soft talents. Through communication, silos can be broken down and project management can proceed without hiccups. People with good time management abilities may balance competing responsibilities and deadlines. Their ability to understand others makes them more empathetic colleagues. No matter how big or tough the change, people can manage it better when they operate as a team.

Empirical evidence indicates that employers broadly seek these soft talents. In the 2022 Grad Report from ZipRecruiter, 93% of employers stated that soft skills “play a critical role” in their hiring decisions. The business also conducted an audit of its employment board and discovered that, over the course of a year, millions of job listings included soft skills as a prerequisite. That means that employees should have the same vested interest in improving these skills.

A 2017 study by academics from MIT Sloan, the University of Michigan, and Boston College found evidence to support the idea that soft skills improve a workplace’s bottom line. According to the study, textile workers in Bangalore, India who received training in soft skills were more productive, showed higher attendance rates, and shown improved retention during the training period. The study also revealed that the firm received a 250% return on investment from the skills training, with extra benefits accruing to coworkers who were not directly trained. After the training program concluded, the employer saw that return on investment in just eight months.

The advantages for the person and the company are obvious.

Help Employees Identify Areas To Improve

If you don’t know what has to be improved, you can’t change anything.

Even by itself, the term “soft skills” is broad. Although the desire to enhance soft skills generally is admirable, training individuals in all of them at once is more challenging and less successful.

Alternatively, you can help your teams identify areas for improvement by using surveys or evaluations, and then work backward to help them develop a plan to enhance those skills. You might give a soft skill more priority for the team as a whole if you notice a pattern in the areas where individuals are in need of assistance.

Your staff will be grateful for the chance as well; having an endless number of options can be demoralizing and cause them to make no decisions at all.