When the COVID-19 pandemic pushed office workers to remote settings, employees sought assistance to upskill and cope with the big changes in their roles.
In April 2020, LinkedIn Learning saw users watching three times as many hours of courses, as compared to February that year, HR Dive reported. In the same time period, 10 times as many users accessed courses on stress management, and managers were the most likely to access development opportunities, especially those with a large emphasis on learning soft skills. In the LinkedIn Learning’s Workplace Learning Report 2021, managers focused 24 percent more of their learning on soft skills, “compared to the average learner.”
The uncertain landscape of 2020 and 2021 so far shed a new light on why soft skills are critically important in the workplace, and how learning and development plays a huge role in forming a culture where they can grow.
Flexibility and adaptability
The shift to a higher emphasis on soft skills — such as flexibility or adaptability — is especially critical for managers and leaders.
“You need to be able to pivot and react because we just don’t know what’s happening,” says Kelly Palmer, chief learning and talent officer at Degreed and co-author of “The Expertise Economy.” The most successful leaders throughout the past couple of years were those most flexible and adaptable, who reacted quickly to keep the business running.
On the employee side, learning to be flexible and adaptable means being valuable to their next employer. When roles change, people unwilling to change along with the roles will have a hard time in the future of work, Palmer says. “We can never think that we’re done learning. We all need to be realizing we need to keep learning all the time, every day, because things are constantly changing.”
Flexibility is also a trait employers are specifically seeking in new hires, according to the Monster Future of Work: 2021 Global Outlook report. Other top skills Monster listed include dependability, teamwork/collaboration, and problem solving/critical thinking. The responsibility for upskilling is shared between employer and candidate, with 48 percent saying the candidate is responsible and 62 percent saying the employer bears the burden of training.
Communication and building a culture of safety
In order for the workplace itself to be flexible and adapt to a challenging staffing landscape, business leaders must first listen to the needs of their employees to then construct what’s best for the organization.
“Now, the need for compassion, flexibility, listening, is really flipped to leadership and the management of the organization in a very escalated way,” says Marti Konstant, workplace futurist and author of “Activate Your Agile Career.”
Effective communication from the top of the organization is imperative to business success. “If organizations aren’t training their leadership on these types of listening skills and employee experience cultivation skills, they’re going to miss out on the retention and the recruitment,” Konstant says.
Workers often avoid speaking up out of fear of retaliation, says Deidre Alves, chief leadership officer at ExuLAB, a leadership development and coaching service. Leaders should create conditions for these conversations to flourish by working consistently on communication, as well as building a sense of trust in an uncertain world.
Alves shared a story of once being admitted to an emergency room and struggling to communicate with her doctor. When the doctor sat down, looked her in the eye, and said she was the most important person to him and that he’s listening, she was finally able to share what was ailing her. “He set the conditions for me to communicate what I needed to tell him because I knew he cared, and I could feel it,” she says. “I was safe to talk.”
Time for building skills — and applying them
Leaders and employees will need a lot of time to build soft skills. Training, ongoing conversations, active listening and effective communication all take time. But how does one find the time to nurture soft skills in a burned-out workforce?
Learning leaders should step in to stop the noise and chaos, by helping managers block time for building soft skills on a continual basis, Alves says.
“Time is a commodity now, and speed seems to be the norm now,” Alves added, but speed leaves little time for reflection: where the learner can take what they have acquired as new knowledge, and apply it.
Whether or not leaders slow down and spend the time to communicate and build trust will affect the company down the line. “Your leadership is a direct, mirror reflection of the success or failure of an organization,” Alves says.
Leadership should spend that time to build soft skills, as well as model the behavior they want employees to emulate, Palmer says. She offered a simple exercise: Leaders can start meetings by sharing what they learned, read or discovered in the past workweek — if leaders admit that they spent working hours to enhance personal or professional experience, employees will feel empowered to do so too.
The role of the CLO
Achieving leadership buy-in can be difficult, but since the pandemic began, leaders have caught on more to the importance of skill-building and the role of a learning leader.
In March 2020, only 24 percent of learning leaders agreed that L&D has a seat at the executive table, according to LinkedIn Learning’s Workplace Learning Report 2021. By June of the same year, 62 percent of learning leaders had a seat at the table, and this number remained stable when measured again in March 2021.
Still, measurement remains an important tool for gaining organizational buy-in of building soft skills. “It’s important to measure because if you don’t have a baseline by which to start, then you don’t know how you’re progressing,” Palmer says. Measuring skills before and after a workshop or training will reveal how effective the program was and how much individuals improved in their soft skills.
Surveys can help gain leadership buy-in around which soft skills the company should focus on. Palmer shared the example of men interrupting women in meetings. Some leaders might think an issue like this is true for other organizations but not their own, but actually surveying employees internally can take the pulse on issues and identify what the organization’s leadership should focus on, in both training and during meetings. “It’s actually very action-oriented,” Palmer says.
Buy-in also can come through tailoring soft skills L&D, Palmer says. She sees workers struggle to navigate a seemingly endless amount of content and skills they can choose to focus on. “Let’s help people not be overwhelmed by all of this,” Palmer says “[And] focus on what skills are most important for the individual.”
Palmer advised that learning leaders can distill down the vast landscape of skills and content by first listing three skills the company needs for the future, add a few more soft skills, and break those down into granular skills. Show employees the list, and have individuals and their managers choose one that they think will benefit them most. Next, they’ll need to come to a mutual agreement on what to work on, then have ongoing discussions between employee and manager to further cultivate their skills.
Ongoing communication is a must for John Wright, president and founder at Simple Leadership Strategies, and learning leaders can help by holding managers accountable. His leadership coaching business helps develop those soft skills, but they require regular communication: getting teams together once a month. Those regular touchpoints mean a program isn’t one-and-done, and the company culture can change as a result of that continuous work.
“By far, the biggest obstacle is the attitude and example of the learning leader” and senior-level managers that are part of the program, Wright says. If employees see their bosses not participating in exercises or nobody talks about it, or if there are no reminders, then the program will fall flat, added.
Learning leaders should hold managers accountable to initiatives, whether that’s by requiring a form be submitted to their reporting systems, or by simply talking to the people working with those managers.
All eyes are on leaders, Wright says, and “if they’re not doing it, it ain’t gonna work.”
"soft" - Google News
September 29, 2021 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/3AX6zcQ
An arduous year and a half at work punctuates soft skills - Chief Learning Officer
"soft" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QZtiPM
https://ift.tt/2KTtFc8
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "An arduous year and a half at work punctuates soft skills - Chief Learning Officer"
Post a Comment