Soft skills are becoming important competencies within companies that have an interest in raising awareness and training their employees to enable them to evolve in their environment. In this article, we come back to the concept of soft skills, why they are so popular and how to train your employees.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills are personal and interpersonal qualities that play an important role in a company. Thanks to soft skills, employees can better understand the professional environment around them.
Soft skills to have in a company
To give you an idea of the different soft skills that are present in companies, Jérôme Hoarau and Julien Bouret, authors of the book Le réflexe soft skills, les compétences des leaders de demain (The soft skills reflex, the skills of tomorrow’s leaders), have identified 15 soft skills to be mastered by 2020.Problem solving
- Confidence
- Emotional intelligence.
- Empathy
- Communication skills
- Time management
- Stress management
- Creativity
- Entrepreneurial spirit
- Boldness
- Motivation
- Vision, visualization
- Presence
- Sense of teamwork
- Curiosity
How to train your employees in soft skills?
If most of these skills are interpersonal and intuitive, it is possible to develop them. There are three ways to help your employees develop these new skills.
- The training
Training courses allow you to develop certain soft skills such as creativity and time management. E-learning courses will allow you to introduce these skills progressively on a daily basis. Solunea can assist you in the development of your customized soft skills training. Depending on the specific needs of your company and your employees, Solunea will create a perfectly adapted training program. Thaleia can also help you create your own soft skills training.
- Coaching
Corporate coaching also works very well for the development of soft skills. After an analysis of the needs of your employees concerning soft skills, coaching sessions will allow you to work on key competencies in a collective or individual way.
- Practical workshops
Putting into practice the notions seen during the e-learning courses or the coaching sessions is the stage that perfectly concludes the development of soft skills in a company. During these workshops, you can bring your teams together to participate in role-playing games which concern, for example, empathy, communication, team spirit, etc. You can also set up a real project that will require the use of all these skills such as the creation of a micro-business (fictitious or real) within the company in order to mobilize all the soft skills mentioned above.
Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash
