In any business, soft skills are incredibly important for your employees. Many people focus primarily on improving tangible skills and giving their employees opportunities to get certifications or further their education. While doing so is very important, it is equally vital to focus on improving employees’ soft skills as well. Here are some ways you can help employees do so.
Explain the importance
The first step to helping your employees improve their soft skills is by explaining the importance to them. Too often, soft skills are overlooked as people get ready for and progress through their careers. If you want your employees to truly improve their soft skills, they must first know why they should be improved.
Hold learning opportunities
You can hold learning opportunities for your employees. These can be fairly simple; focus on different soft skills and explain what they are, their importance, and how employees can improve them. Encourage employees to attend these sessions or make them mandatory. Simply highlighting ways and offering advice to employees can go a long way.
Suggest outside resources
If you feel that your company doesn’t have the time or resources to work on educating employees, direct them toward some outside resources. There are plenty of books, videos, and articles online they can find to provide information on learning soft skills. Providing lists of these to employees gives them plenty of options to learn more and improve their soft skills.
Evaluate them
In order for your organization to thrive, you need to have employees that have a solid understanding of soft skills and work to improve their overall knowledge of their role. Like any other job evaluation, you can evaluate soft skills as well. Begin incorporating it into regular employee reviews; ask them to take tests to evaluate their soft skills or simply take steps to improve them.
Set goals
While it can sometimes be challenging to concretely measure soft skills and provide clear goals for improving them, you can still try. Find some clear goals you can work toward over a period of months and see how it goes. Working together for these goals is important; have supervisors and employees work together in order to meet these goals.