Cultivating Soft Skills in the Remote Working Era

In the era of hybrid and remote workforces, the importance of communication and collaboration has been greatly magnified. Solving problems and working together comes much more naturally with the physical proximity of an office environment. As a result, the cultivation of your employees’ soft skills needs to be included in your online learning programme.

Physical separation can easily lead to inadequate communication and misunderstandings. This added to feelings of isolation can negatively affect company morale. Low productivity and engagement soon follow. E-learning initiatives can help overcome this.

Skills

Emotional intelligence is now a widely talked about trait that is sought after when hiring new people. It can also be enhanced among existing staff. EQ refers to being able to gauge another’s emotions as well as one’s own. Awareness of emotions and the ability to regulate them is vital in a group. Empathy and kindness are basic social skills that enhance teamwork but are not always in place. Training staff to concentrate on being more polite, kind, and sensitive to colleagues is a good place to start.

Encouraging your people to communicate carefully and focus on the clarity and tone of their emails and messaging is important. This might require more frequent communication to ensure proper understanding. Sensing when there is a lack of understanding and then adjusting the messaging is part of this process. This results in better efficiency and less conflict.

Listening is often a challenge but even more so in remote working due to the technological filters and home distractions. Creating online training modules on how to manage distractions to maximise listening can be very effective. Part of this would focus on how voice cues and facial expressions indicate what others are thinking and how cameras should always be used during video meetings.

Practice

Using your LMS to deliver soft skills training provides your staff the opportunity to practice regularly and revisit training modules that address situations they might be encountering. Over the last couple of years, levels of stress and anxiety have dramatically increased, and mental health is more in focus. Helping employees better manage their personal interactions at work through improved soft skills is one way of supporting your people while benefitting your business. E-learning provides an easy way of adding this training to the rest of your learning curricula.

Allocating resources to content creation focusing on soft skills training could even help your company keep talent at a time when many are leaving their jobs due to stress and burnout. Forward-thinking organisations realise their people need higher levels of support than ever before.