For more than a century, jobs dominated the structure of work. It defined how the organization performs, who leads and manages the work, and how employees support every HR process from hiring and compensation to career progression and performance management. Today, most organizations are moving towards a completely new operating model for work and workforce that prioritize skills more than jobs. Leaders are focusing on ongoing efforts to evaluate skills, conduct training programs and manage succession planning to enhance employee skills and better organizational performance.
Human Skills: Understanding the Concept
Human skills or soft skills focus on the qualities of the employees; instead of focusing on the training, they received to fulfil a requirement. Human skills are interpersonal skills intrinsic to an individual’s personality, and the best leaders characterize how you interact with other people in the workplace. It includes people, personality, and communication skills your employees require for the organization’s long-term success.
Benefits of Human Skills Development
Since every job requires employees to communicate with all your stakeholders, you must not overlook human skills. Enlisted are the benefits of human skills development.
Enhanced productivity, efficiency, and teamwork
Human skills empower your people to collaborate, work and achieve organizational goals together. It, in turn, leads to improved efficiency and increased productivity. However, with the increasing focus on human skills, we often neglect hard skills. You must give equal priority to both to build a diverse workforce.
Boosts creativity and critical thinking
With human skills development, your employees can think out of the box creatively and critically. These skills help in weighing their options and making informed decisions, making them more likely to achieve the results they want.
Boosts problem-solving skills and self-confidence
With soft skills development, your employees can identify the problems and potential roadblocks to their goals and projects and develop the perfect solutions. Besides, human skills help employees feel more confident about their performance.
Strategies to Develop Human Skills in the Organization
Enlisted are the steps managers and other organizational leaders must adopt to develop human skills in their employees.
Cultivate emotional intelligence
An individual’s emotional intelligence refers to recognizing and understanding your and others’ emotions. You can train your employees on how emotions drive behavior and how emotions are fundamental for developing emotional intelligence. When you and your employees understand how emotional responses affect behavior, it might help everyone to avoid hurting others during challenging conversations. It further motivates employees, develops positive relationships, and builds strong collaborative teams.
Genuine and sincere appreciation and compliments
As a leader and manager, you must always thank your subordinates for their efforts in achieving organizational goals. Even a simple thank you makes your employees feel appreciated. When you make others feel good, you positively impact people’s minds.
Similarly, complimenting your employees about their unique traits, skills, possession, or accomplishment gives them feelings of recognition and value. The more close attention you give to your employee, more important they feel. Complementing even on small things helps build rapport.
Develop conversational skills
Engaging your employees in conversation is an important people skill, and you can develop this with practice. Often your best employee hesitates to start a conversation. You can ask questions regarding their interest and enjoyable aspects of their work. You can even arrange a training course that helps your employees to communicate effectively. Remember, the highest-paid and most successful people on the planet are master communicators. They learned to take control of even the most challenging situations, understand the art of persuasion and utilize persuasive strategies.
Employees must identify their core values
When employees clarify their core values, it highlights what they stand for. Your core values also represent your uniqueness and personal style, guiding your behavior and providing you with a personal code of conduct. When you honor your core values consistently, you experience fulfillment in every part of your life.
Measure the progress
Although traditional methods, such as annual surveys, are helpful, the present technologies allow for more frequent, less intrusive, and more insightful measures of learning and performance over time. When you design your employees’ learning experience, push single questions to learners regularly over several weeks to assess improvements in the human skills you try to develop.
Conclusion
In today’s complex and demanding world, leaders dealing with talent development and learning experiences choices about where to focus their efforts for the best impact. If you want to develop exclusive human skills, you can always reach Talent Intellect. As Asia-Pacific’s leading HR Advisory & Consulting firm based in Thailand, the organization offers full-suite talent management services, including human skills development, to help businesses to attract, retain and motivate their top talent for a sustainable business.
