3 Consequential Soft Skills That Should Be Part of Your Post-Pandemic Learning & Development Curriculum

The pandemic has significantly transformed the workplace and how people interact. It has also transformed the learning and development (L&D) paradigm and its course of curriculum. Before the pandemic, L&D had been weighted toward “training” the tactical. It now must be transformed to balance skilling and upskilling with the soft skills needed to survive and thrive in a fluid corporate ecosystem with team members who are often disconnected by time and space.  Today’s evolving hybrid workplace environment demands the learning and development of totally new capabilities and techniques for employees to be able to effectively communicate and work together from a variety of locations and across a diversity of generations and backgrounds. 

Management skills are affected, too. Because we don’t have enterprise leadership and managers “walking the floor” anymore, they will need to learn and adopt new techniques to accomplish critical tasks more effectively, such as:

• Communicating
• Mentoring
• Fostering employee interaction
• Building corporate culture
• Delivering praise and criticism
• Obtaining feedback
• Brainstorming
• Supervising—approving work, catching errors and providing tips.

It’s not just leadership that needs to learn skills for the new environment. Virtually every employee must reorient and enhance their skills. As important as hard skills and upskilling are to improving the efficiency and profitability of an organization, the enrichment of soft skills is more valuable now than ever in helping to center people and give them the ability and confidence they need to participate successfully in this new environment.

We have identified three main categories of soft skills that should guide the evolution of learning and development designed to help employees more effectively engage in today’s workplace environment:

1. Emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence continues to be an important part of leadership and culture. Note the following definition of emotional intelligence that is highly relevant in today’s workplace: the ability to identify and regulate one’s own emotions, to recognize the emotions of other people and feel empathy toward them, to manage stress and to use these abilities to communicate effectively and build healthy, productive relationships with others. In today’s hybrid environment, care must be taken so as not to let technology and distance get in the way of connecting and of being connected to the organization and to its culture.

   Without emotional intelligence, management now having less control over a work-from-home environment can lead to frustrations and negativity. Skills must be learned to enhance understanding, empathy, self-awareness, patience, connectedness and enthusiasm within the organization.

2. Communication. Effective communication in a hybrid world consists of two parts: having the skills to communicate the messages and knowing how to best utilize the latest technology to communicate. Learning and sharpening effective communication skills is especially valuable where proficiency in media, tools, techniques, etiquette, protocol, messaging, interaction and more will enhance communication success for the individual, helping strengthen relationships and get things done.

3. Decision-making. In today’s hybrid work environment, methods that management use for collecting data and analyzing it to make management decisions have changed dramatically. Because the team is no longer in literal view of the manager, a manager needs to learn and develop new techniques to maintain that “view.” For example, are metrics such as PTO use, clocking in, and absenteeism even relevant? Learning new methods for identifying and collecting relevant data, analyzing it, and then making decisions that are pertinent to this environment are leadership skills that must be updated to lead to organizational success.

Although soft skills may be more difficult to quantify when calculating a return on investment, data suggests that learning new metrics to use may demonstrate soft skill value. For example, a number of studies have shown that employees actually place a higher value on learning soft skills because they perceive them to be in the area of self-improvement, that is, life skills they can use both in the workplace and in their personal lives. Using the metric of lowered employee turnover, in place of profitability or efficiency metrics, will more accurately validate soft skill learning and development’s true value: the critical role it plays in moving the enterprise forward.