How do Soft Skills Benefit Employees?

Posted 2 years ago

Soft skills can be defined as the skills we use to communicate, build relationships, approach work, manage time, and so much more. They’re often associated with personality attributes such as high productivity, resilience, and a powerful work ethic. Developing your employees’ soft skills can lead to increased engagement and well-being in the workplace.

These skills play a crucial part in an employer’s decision to keep, hire or promote an employee. They also make it easier for people to build relationships and trust and lead teams. They are essential for workplace growth and success.

Regardless of how long somebody has been in paid work, their age, or how long they’ve been at a company, soft skills are essential for all levels of employees.

An employee might apply some of these skills differently or use one of them a lot more day-to-day, and this might be because of their role or the working experience they have. But regardless, there will still be specific soft skills that people have to consciously work on more than others or some that come more naturally to them.

What are the benefits of developing soft skills?

Developing these skills can help you build and enhance your career path, win business, and build long-lasting relationships.

Although all employees could benefit from developing soft skills, the types of employees who might benefit the most from developing these skills include leaders and young employees.

Leaders: Improving staff engagement and wellbeing

Leaders can come in many forms – team leaders, managers, supervisors and business owners. In order to be a successful leader, it’s important to continually look for ways to maintain and improve employee wellbeing and engagement in the workplace.

Your team is the foundation of your business success, so it’s important to ensure that they remain happy and engaged. Otherwise, you will begin to see a decline in productivity.

Those in leadership roles or looking to be promoted into leadership positions might want to possess or develop these soft skills:

Active Listening
Communication skills
Problem-solving
Confidence
Time management
Delegation
Motivational skills
Conflict resolution

In order to have a productive and well-performing team, a leader needs to possess many of the skills listed above, but a critical trait that’s sought after in leaders is someone that can inspire and motivate a team.

It’s important to acknowledge that hard skills may be required as part of a job role. With the increase in demand for people to have well developed soft skills, employers might be more inclined to hire a manager that can inspire their team every day over someone who has an extra qualification to their name.

93% of employers said that Soft Skills are either an “essential” or “very important” factor in hiring decisions.

Wonderlic

Young employees: developing skills to keep you engaged

Young employees, or those who might be new to full-time paid employment, will also require a strong set of soft skills. The most important aspect of soft skills for young people is that they are transferable. Regardless of what job or industry they have been developed in, you could easily apply them across a multitude of job roles.

In fact, with 92% of talent acquisition professionals reporting that soft skills are equally or more important when hiring than hard skills (LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends), it’s now equally as important for young people to develop these skills with equal importance to hard skills.

Young employees might want to think about developing these skills…

Creative and/or critical thinking
Problem-solving
Mindfulness
Time Management
Communication skills
Emotional intelligence
Listening skills
Resilience

As soft skills are becoming more and more a part of hiring decisions, it’s important to develop these skills as early into employees’ careers as they can. If a young employee takes an interview for a job, being able to have a reference that can advocate for their work experience, including their well-developed soft skills, might be the difference between them getting hired or not.

Investing in your young employee’s soft skills can have positive effects, including increased engagement, productivity and wellbeing.

Job role or level aside, soft skills are beneficial for any employee, and with their increase in popularity due to employers wanting to invest more into their employees as individuals, people without them will slowly begin to stand out more for the wrong reasons!

How can someone develop soft skills?

Every employee will possess certain soft skills, whether they realise it or not. But perhaps most importantly, soft skills can be developed. With businesses increasingly seeking out employees with strong, soft skills, it can also be useful for employees to recognise their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to soft skills to help them in the workplace. In the long run, it will make the team stronger and also help the individual development of employees and support them in their roles.

One effective way of helping staff to identify areas for improvement is by asking your employees to carry out a review of their soft skills.

With that said, we’ve put together a free-to-download checklist to help individuals assess whether they are strong in a specific soft skill or would like to develop it further. It can also help to note down examples of when a skill may have been used and any areas for improvement.

The checklist comes as part of our Soft Skills White Paper and can be downloaded for free here.

What is soft skills training?

Soft Skills courses are a perfect way to increase staff engagement, motivation, and wellbeing. Soft skills training helps to instil trust from staff and customers alike by solidifying the level of expertise within your organisation.

Our growing Soft Skills Training library is the perfect starting point for your employees to start developing their soft skills.

Our Workplace Training and Skills for Young Adults bundle allows you to provide your young employees with the skills they need to thrive. You can also find out more about the Kickstart Scheme here too. Young employees can learn more about building their confidence, managing their time, and building their resilience in the workplace.

And for those in leadership roles, our Leadership Training bundle is a great starting point to really evolve the skills of a great leader. With courses for helping to resolve conflict, solve problems and manage both your and your team’s time, this bundle is a great starting point.

Many of our soft skills courses are part of our inclusive short-format course library, which comes free on any user-based plan!

Get started with a free, no-obligation trial, or request a bespoke quote today!