Soft skills are not taught at school and neither can be accurately positioned in a job description. However, they have a major role in the availability to perform successfully in a company and thrive. Employees that have soft skills can lift your company into new heights. Soft skills can be acquired but are difficult to train on. 

What are they? Those are characteristics, habits, and capabilities that are an absolute must to have in the modern work environment. Those skills are differentiating from one employee to another and will determine if they are good collaborators and partners. 

Employee vs Partner approach 

In the old days of employment, companies saw the relationship between employers and employees in a very defined and narrow way. Employees had to fulfill tasks and not much effort or attention was given to their personality and internal evolvement. 

The game changer came in when employees started to be seen as partners and the definition of employment became broader, giving attention to unique characteristics of people within the company and encouraging them to share ideas. We would like to emphasize that being a partner is not aligned with revenue sharing, we refer to prioritizing the focus on human skills and understanding your team capabilities. It means providing employees the power to influence, having an open-minded approach and adopting ideas and contributions of individuals. The idea represents the transformation from a pure management approach into leadership. 

If you expect people within your organization to demonstrate soft skills, you should start by switching approaches early in the hiring process. You will have to focus on personality type, analyze the ability to work in teams, and find the special strengths of people you are looking to hire. Remember that in order to help your future employees demonstrate their talents and soft skills, you will need to make sure that you match your own expectations. 

How to start? Check if you are a strong listener and review your communication capabilities. If you are typically following your own path and not taking much into account your team members’ thoughts, this is the time to change. Remember that you should be the best version of your expectations from others. Those should  include professionalism, human relations management, and core values like commitment, dedication, transparency etc. 

The literature defined 7 nontechnical skills as the most important for any working environment and those are the following: 

• Leadership Skills.
• Teamwork. 
• Communication Skills
• Problem Solving Skills. 
• Work Ethic. 
• Flexibility/Adaptability. 
• Interpersonal Skills.

If you are positive that as the employer you have those in your skills basket, this would be a great opportunity to help your team develop them further. We do not believe that they can be transferred easily and as stated early identification and being a role model will help in order to transmit those soft skills until they become part of your culture. 

Helping Your team

Typically there is a lack of systematic evaluation and certification mechanisms for soft qualifications. You need to help your HR department to set up a framework that includes evaluation criteria. 

Even though it feels like evaluating soft skills is almost impossible, you can definitely set up qualitative and quantitative criteria. For example, if you’d like to evaluate problem-solving capabilities, you will use the time to provide a solution as a quantitative evaluation form and proactivity or suitability assessment as a quantitative evaluation form. In your one on one meetings or reviews, you will share feedback and help employees improve. 

Recruiting for soft skills which can be tricky. We suggest following structured interview questions that generate answers about one’s past work or life experiences. In this way, you will increase your chances to understand their potential and ability to contribute- now or in the future. As well you can use hypothetical scenarios to measure and analyze responses. 

Remember that hiring people that already demonstrate a high level of soft skills and qualities will save you time and money in the long run. Technical skills requirements are crucial but they should be combined with complementary capabilities.