Is your organization giving more importance to hard skills like qualifications and industry-specific expertise over soft skills, such as communication? It is easy to be caught in this trap.

Luckily, numerous companies are beginning to realize the significance of soft skills in the professional environment and the necessity of combining both hard and soft skills to create efficient, cooperative, and vibrant teams. In the end, an employee's soft skills can impact how they use their hard skills and work with colleagues.

Therefore, how can employers offer their employees the chance to enhance their soft skills? Continue reading to understand how to conduct soft skills development training for your employees.

What does soft skills training entail?

Soft skills training develops communication, teamwork, and problem-solving abilities instead of technical skills. Additional soft skills encompass emotional intelligence, maintaining a positive outlook, and showing proactive behavior. The importance of soft skill development in the workplace is frequently overlooked. Nevertheless, it holds equal importance to technical skills.

Soft skills, as opposed to hard skills, do not pertain to a particular industry or role but rather focus on traits and conduct. Although hard skills like data analysis, reporting, or mathematical ability can be easily taught, soft skills training presents more difficulty due to the need to teach new behaviors and approaches to thinking.

It is more challenging to measure the impact of soft skills training in the workplace since it is typically less quantitative in nature. Developing a strong training plan for soft skills and selecting the right platform can impact the outcome of success or failure.

Benefits of Soft Skills Development Training

Soft skills are highly sought after by companies and are crucial elements of a strong, understanding, and driven workforce. Advantages of soft skills courses and training include:

• Improved collaboration and relationships

  Enhancing key abilities like communication and teamwork can lead to stronger workplace relationships and increased collaboration, ultimately improving team productivity.

• Leading with empathy

  Having strong soft skills is essential in all positions, including leadership roles. Leaders who possess high emotional intelligence and strong interpersonal abilities have a higher chance of successfully motivating their employees through empathy and fostering meaningful connections.

• More satisfied workers and higher employee retention rates

  Investing in training for employees' soft skills shows that you value their growth, equipping them with valuable skills to improve their job performance and satisfaction.

  Improving key soft skills can also enhance the workplace atmosphere, increasing the chances of retaining employees and even reducing instances of absenteeism. Manage your employee absenteeism using the Bradford score calculator.

• Improved customer service and increased client satisfaction.

  Training in soft skills instructs employees on effective communication and how to approach problems with increased confidence. Training on soft skills in the workplace can also enhance their abilities to listen and empathize, which are crucial when interacting with customers or clients, especially in challenging situations.

• Improved ability to solve problems

  Soft skills training can provide employees with improved problem-solving abilities. It can assist individuals in viewing problems from different perspectives, expressing difficulties more efficiently, and executing different strategies.

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Top Soft Skills To Enhance Employee Performance

Soft skills training not only contributes to employee happiness and fulfillment, but also enhances employee performance. Some of the top soft skills that can enhance employee performance include:

• Communication

  Effective communication is one of the key soft skills that professionals should prioritize. Having strong communication skills is crucial for working efficiently and effectively, whether you are interacting with team members or clients. It also helps in building relationships with those around you.

• Teamwork

  Teamwork is an essential skill for every team member, particularly in a corporate setting. Training in soft skills can assist employees in recognizing their strengths and weaknesses in a team setting and figuring out the most effective ways to communicate with others to achieve optimal results.

• Time Management

  Good time management is crucial for effective operations and cost reduction. Focusing excessively on a single task or ignoring another can result in inefficiencies and dissatisfied clients. Providing a soft skills course for employees to learn effective time management and multitasking is a valuable skill for them to develop.

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Tips For Facilitating Training On Soft Skills Development

Just as with any learning and growth initiative, it's important to begin by assessing the gap in your current skills. To identify opportunities for enhancing soft skills, communicate with employees throughout the organization to see if there are any noticeable areas for growth, and seek input from managers to see if certain soft skills like communication or organization are commonly mentioned in evaluations.

Determining the format and delivery method for your soft skills training, is the next step. Would you prefer to do in-person training, provide interactive online courses through a learning management system, or use a combination of the two methods?

Once you opt for online learning, the next task is selecting an authoring tool that provides all the necessary features for efficiently creating professional soft skills. Considering your familiarity with eLearning authoring tools, financial resources, and project intricacy, certain soft skills courses may be more suitable than others, thus it is important to test out a few demos to determine the best solution.

After choosing your authoring tool, you can proceed to create your content by either using pre-made templates or starting from the beginning. Make sure to involve experts in the subject area from all areas of your Learning and Development as well as Human Resources teams to guarantee that your content is successful. For best outcomes, select interactive options like quizzes, branched scenarios, and videos to maintain employee engagement.

In addition to digital soft skills courses, you may want to explore individual coaching sessions, group workshops, and peer mentoring.

Soft Skills Training Modules

Modules for eLearning focused on developing soft skills could contain any combination of these components:

• Examples of situations showing how soft skills are applied and their effect on individuals

• Videos providing examples of both effective and ineffective practices for learners to observe and learn from

• Videos that are interactive and present a situation with characters, prompting learners to utilize their soft skills in making a decision. Next, the learner can observe the consequences of this choice for the characters.

• Surveys that prompt your staff to answer a question and then contrast their answers with those of their colleagues. These inquiries can help investigate the ambiguous situations linked to soft skills, where there may not always be a clear-cut correct or incorrect way to use them.

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