Solution: Talent Advisory

Soft Skills Training for Employees: Improving Internal Mobility with Soft Skills Training

Posted on by edyson

Soft skills training can help both employers and employees alike. Soft skills are increasingly important as organisations across all industries look to fill roles, and talent leaders are increasingly investing in internal mobility programs to harness the skills of internal talent. While employers can assess candidates and employees alike for competencies like communication, conflict resolution and problem solving, some internal candidates may need additional training or education when moving into a new role or area of business operations. What’s more, soft skills training can help improve client relationships and foster a stronger team dynamic. In this article, we list the benefits of including soft skills into your employee training and professional development program.

Benefits of Soft Skills Training

Improved Customer Service

When an employer invests in soft skills training for employees, they are preparing their workforce to better engage customers. For example, training employees on active listening means they will more effectively establish customer needs, identify issues and help resolve them. Moreover, empathy can have a positive impact on company culture as a whole in addition to customer service.

Soft Skills Training Can Increase Sales

Improving soft skills can benefit your sales team during the sales negotiation process. Employees can use their competencies to engage with the client on a more personal level, without breaching the all-important professional boundaries, and your customers will appreciate this. When employees take additional time to discuss the pain points that your clients experience and match them with the right solution, the sale will happen by itself.

Better Employee Retention

Investing in the professional growth of your employees will pay off with increased employee retention. You will reduce the need to hire and train replacement staff, thus reducing organisational costs. Additionally, soft skills improve knowledge retention and equip employees to take ownership of their personal development.

Top Soft Skills in the Workplace

Now that we have outlined some of the benefits of soft skills training, here we provide the top soft skill competencies you should concentrate your employee soft skills training on. LinkedIn published a list of the most in-demand soft skills with leadership, communication, collaboration and time management coming out as the soft skills employers were actively seeking. In this section, we take a take closer look at the specific skills you should consider training your employees on and the best ways to train your employees.

There are a number of options for delivering soft skills training to your workforce. You can dedicate entire courses solely to soft skills, or you can add relevant soft skill sections to your existing employee education content. In terms of delivery methods, consider using some of the options outlined below.

Coaching and Mentoring

If you identify an employee who has a development need for a specific soft skill like leadership, you can consider bringing in a mentor or coach and tailor a learning approach that’s specific and targeted. The coaching process in the workplace typically implies collaboration with the employee to identify, target, and plan for better performance.

A coach can help the employee define their goals, existing skill sets, strengths, and, of course, weaknesses. For example: the employee finds out that he/she is not good enough at communicating with the staff supervised, so a coach creates a development strategy and provides him/her with a clear pathway to improve their communication skills. When an employee is on their way to implement this strategy, a trainer supports them and provides them with actionable feedback.

Coaching and mentoring is especially effective in imparting soft skills, such as communication and leadership which are key in improving customer service.

Interactive Workshops

If you want to train an entire group of employees in a specific soft skill, you can organize live workshops to reach as many employees as possible while also helping to foster team building skills. The best workshops have a concrete, action-oriented purpose and aim to find answers to current problems in the field.

Let’s say you want to teach your customer service staff how to resolve conflicts with clients. You can develop role-play scenarios and play them out right in the workshop. Let the supervisor or learning and development representative be a disgruntled customer and your employees will have to try to settle the conflict. Based on their responses, the trainer will be able to bridge skill gaps and point them in the right direction.

Peer Learning

Another effective yet simple way of developing soft skills is to learn with other people. Research has shown there is a significant link between having fun in the workplace and informal learning. You can take advantage of this by creating streams of work or small-scale projects that require collaboration between colleagues at work. Or you can undertake social learning online via the use of social apps and other tools.

Try launching a peer forum where employees will discuss soft skills in the workplace and how to achieve their full potential. They will have a place to ask questions and share stories to get peer-based feedback. For instance, an employee encountered a particularly difficult customer who got on his/her nerves. He/she can share his/her experience on the forum, discuss it with colleagues, and get useful advice for the future.

What Is Emotional Intelligence? Is it a Soft Skill That Can Be Learned?

Emotional Intelligence or (EI) is the ability of a person to manage both their own emotions and understand the emotions of people around them. There are five key elements to EI: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Employees with high EI are better at identifying how they are feeling, what those feelings mean, and how those emotions impact their behavior and in turn, other people such as customers and coworkers.

It can be a little difficult to “manage” the emotions of others as one cannot control how someone else feels or behaves. If employees can identify the emotions behind their behavior, they have a better understanding of where they are coming from and how to best interact with them.

High EI overlaps with strong interpersonal skills, especially in the areas of conflict management and communication—crucial skills in the workplace. Employees who can self-regulate their emotions are often able to avoid making impulsive decisions since they think objectively before they act. Operating with empathy and understanding is a critical part of teamwork; being able to attribute someone’s behavior to an underlying emotion will help you manage relationships and make others feel heard. On an individual level, being aware of your feelings is the first step in not letting those feelings control you. Recognizing how you feel, and why, will help you to sit with those feelings and then move forward in a productive way. 

Effective leaders are often very emotionally intelligent. In the workplace, it’s important for leaders to be self-aware and able to view things objectively. This translates into understanding your strengths and weaknesses and acting with humility. This must be balanced with empathy—employees who feel appreciated and valued at work aren’t only happier, but more productive.

Fortunately, you can help employees improve EI skills with some thoughtfulness and practice:

  • Ask employees to try to slow down their reactions to emotions. Try phrases like: “Next time you feel angry, try to sit with it before lashing out.” “Did someone upset you?” “What do you think was the emotion underneath their behavior?”
  • Ask employees to think about their strengths and weaknesses. No one is good at everything, and that’s okay! Make sure employees understand that it’s okay to ask for—or offer—help.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, putting in the effort to better train and understand your employees’ soft skills can greatly improve communication between customers, employees and coworkers. The modern workplace can sometimes make employees feel confused and overwhelmed which can have and adverse effect on employee mental health. Soft skills training can equip your workforce with great compassion and competencies that will make an impact on a human level.

Internal Mobility Skills Audit

Posted on by shunter

One of the earliest and most important steps in the internal mobility process is identifying which employees within your organisation should be targeted for internal roles based on skills, experience and willingness to explore new career paths. But, how can you be sure you know the full extent of the skills available within your organisation?

An internal mobility skills audit enables you to understand where employee skills lie, as well as direct your employees’ training and development plans and your overall recruitment strategy.

What is an Internal Mobility Skills Audit?

An internal mobility skills audit is the process of assessing your employees’ skills and then identifying potential internal candidates for open positions based on knowledge, experience, skill sets and flexibility. By assessing the knowledge and skills that already exist within your workforce, you can help develop the careers of existing employees while simultaneously improving your retention rates and filling open roles faster.

Common employee skills include:

  • Technology and digital skills
  • Research skills
  • Quantitative skills
  • Critical thinking skills
  • Analytical skills
  • Soft skills like emotional intelligence
  • Project management
  • Business acumen
  • Project management
  • Teamwork

Who is Responsible for the Internal Mobility Skills Audit?

When it comes to an individual employee who is a candidate for an internal role, team leaders or managers should be responsible for conducting the audit of that employees’ skills. However, larger team analysis for multiple roles is usually done by team leaders, HR or external talent advisors.

Data Collection & Analysis

The goal of data collection and analysis in an internal mobility skills audit is three-fold: 1) to analyze which roles are open now; 2) to rate how important each role is; and 3) to inquire about the skills required to perform the role properly. Data collection and analysis activities can include:

Developing job profiles and identifying critical skills needed for each job role:

  • Review current job descriptions as a reference for the skills that are needed.
  • Consider the effect of upcoming organisational changes or future work trends (such as remote work) on the role.
  • Develop a list of competencies that most clearly and accurately describe what is necessary to do the work.

Conducting an inventory of your employees’ current skills:

  • Position descriptions
  • Job class specifications
  • Performance evaluations and employee assessments
  • Interviews/focus group meetings with supervisors, managers and employees 
  • Self-assessment surveys

As you might expect, it can quickly become difficult to manually keep track of each employee’s competencies and skill levels. Fortunately, talent technology can help you with the data collection process. For example, PeopleScout’s Affinix Internal Mobility can help you access an internal talent pool all in one place so you can quickly source, leverage, promote and reassign talent from within your organisation.

Assessing Internal Candidates

Once internal candidates for open positions have been identified, it’s time for your teams to dive deeper and examine a candidate’s knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs). While the three terms may seem interchangeable, they are actually distinctly different dimensions of a potential internal candidates’ qualifications:

  • Knowledge focuses on the candidate’s understanding of key theoretical concepts important to the role.
  • Skills are the capabilities or hands-on experience needed for the application of theoretical knowledge important for the role.
  • Abilities are the innate traits or talents that a person brings to the role if selected as a successor.

KSAs are the core competencies used when assessing talent and can create a better picture of a potential candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. These are useful in creating your organisation’s internal promotion and talent development programs, and it’s essential to develop a KSA profile of each internal candidate to determine whether their attributes align well with a specific role. 

To begin, your internal mobility team can start building KSA profiles by asking these questions:

  • Where does your organisation see the role evolving in the next three to five years? What skill sets will be required to evolve with the role? 
  • What unique or specialised competencies are necessary to succeed in the role?
  • What qualities should the internal candidate possesses in order to thrive in the role and meet your organisation’s business objectives?

Then, when identifying individual employees as potential internal candidates, consider assessing the following traits:

  • Flexibility and willingness to change roles or work environments
  • Interest in professional development, taking on new projects outside of their duties and learning new skills
  • Good communicators who work well with multiple teams and departments

When completed, the results of a skills audit should be aggregated into a report to obtain a clear view of existing skills and knowledge within your organisation. The information you collect during the audit can then be used to support more than just your internal mobility program. It can also be applied to organisational restructuring and internal promotion, as well as help conduct effective succession planning.

Building an Effective Veteran Hiring Program

Posted on by epadmin

Building an Effective Veteran Hiring Program

If you want to hire veterans, you can’t just wait and hope it happens. Veterans won’t apply through your one-size-fits all careers page. Their skills and experience don’t fit into a standard application. And if veterans do apply, do you have a team that can understand the military language? Can you translate their achievements and place that veteran in the best position for their skill set?

In this ebook, Best Practices for Hiring Veterans, you’ll learn:

  • The most important and effective steps to take when creating a veteran hiring program
  • The veteran hiring landscape
  • The unique challenges veterans face as they transition into the civilian workforce

Soft Skills in the Workplace: Why They Matter and How to Hire for Them

Posted on by edyson

In the era of skills gaps, soft skills matter. For hiring managers, an age-old dilemma persists. Two ostensibly qualified candidates interview for the same position, but only one can be hired. This may seem like an ideal situation a hiring manager. However, it’s still a dilemma, and dilemmas demand solutions.

When choosing between two seemingly equal candidates, organisations are now prioritising “soft skills” as the key differentiator. In fact, in LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report, 92% of talent acquisition professionals reported that soft skills are equally or more important to hire for than hard skills. And, 89% said that when a new hire doesn’t work out, it’s because they lack critical soft skills.

In this article, we define and explain the importance of soft skills in the workplace and how organisations can best assess candidates for them during the hiring process.

What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character or personality traits, attitudes, career attributes, social intelligence, and emotional intelligence quotients that enable employees to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills.

Key soft skills include:

  • Attitude
  • Communication (both listening and speaking skills)
  • Work ethic
  • Teamwork
  • Leadership qualities
  • Time management
  • Decision making
  • Conflict resolution
  • Critical thinking
  • Networking
  • Empathy
  • Problem-solving

Because soft skills are unquantifiable professional attributes, it can be difficult for hiring managers and others involved in the hiring process to assess them in potential hires, making them an important but elusive set of skills to look for.

Soft Skills Are in Demand

Soft skills are becoming increasingly important as organisations look to add additional value to their business. A study conducted by Wonderlic found that 93% of hiring leaders stated that soft skills are an “essential” or “very important” element when making hiring decisions. What’s more, many employers reported that soft skills are more important than tech skills.

Soft Skills

The Wall Street Journal reports, “Competition has heated up for workers with the right mix of soft skills, which vary by industry and across the pay spectrum—from making small talk with a customer at the checkout counter to coordinating a project across several departments on a tight deadline.”

According to a National Association of Colleges and Employers survey, employers emphasised leadership and the ability to work in a team as the most desirable attributes when recruiting recent college graduates, ahead of analytical and quantitative skills.

Burning Glass analysed millions of U.S. job postings and found that one in three skills requested in job postings is a “baseline” or soft skill. “Even in the most technical career areas (such as information technology, and healthcare, more than a quarter of all skill requirements are for baseline skills.”

Talent with the right soft skills is scarce. In fact, LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report cited soft skills training as a top priority and 59% of U.S. hiring managers believe it’s difficult to find candidates with the right soft skills.

Soft Skills And Organisational Outcomes

skills audit internal mobility

Creative and Critical Thinking

Employing a workforce of creative and critical thinkers is essential for introducing fresh ideas, services and products. In fact, creative and critical thinking skills were ranked second and third on the World Economic Forum’s top skills employees will need to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution.

As artificial intelligence and automation in business evolve, creative and critical thinking skills will be increasingly needed to complement the capabilities of machines.

However, creative and critical thinking skills are in short supply. According to a report from the Society for Human Resource Management, 84% of HR professionals stated they found a deficit of key soft skills including creative and critical thinking among job candidates.

Teamwork and Communication  

Teamwork and communication are weak points for many organisations, and it’s causing performance and productivity challenges. Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report found that the majority of employees “believe that their organisation’s project performance would improve if their teams worked more collaboratively.”

What’s more, another Gallup report discovered that teamwork and good communication is a key soft skill for helping B2B organisations solve their top challenge of creating organic growth.

Successful collaboration is strongly related to good communication skills. Communication skills include actively listening to colleagues and willing engagement in conflict resolution to mitigate the effects of miscommunications as well as keeping projects and organisational initiatives on track.

Compassion in Leadership

Compassion is an important aspect of good leadership. Teams thrive when the members trust that their leader cares about them. Research shows that organisations with more compassionate leaders excel at collaboration – already identified as a key soft skill in the modern workplace.

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review authored by Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter and Louise Chester, “Of the over 1,000 leaders we surveyed, 91% said compassion is very important for leadership, and 80% would like to enhance their compassion but do not know how.”

Compassion is a pre-requisite for effective communication and other soft skills that enhance interpersonal relationships in the workplace, which are essential to maintaining workplace cohesion.  

Assessing Candidates

skills assessment

Ask Behaviour-Based Interview Questions

Interview questions that are behaviour-based can help organisations more easily identify the soft skills possessed by the candidate, especially for technical roles where questions are more hard skill-based. They can provide a look into how they respond in certain situations or to various challenges.

Instead of questions starting out with, “do you” interviewers should try starting out with, “what are your thoughts on” or, “how would you?”

Examples of behaviour-based questions to ask candidates applying for more technical positions:

  • Ask how they usually develop relationships with coworkers and supervisors
  • A problem they solved in a creative way or unique way
  • A time they had to deal with someone who was difficult
  • Ask them to describe their ideal work environment and method(s) of communication
  • Ask them to share a time they needed help or guidance on a project and how they went about asking for it
  • Ask them to share a time they had communication problems with their manager or coworkers. How did they handle the situation and their colleague’s responses?

Also, ask candidates how they think their soft skills will help them in the role they are interviewing for. Their answers can reveal how well they understand the nature of the position and its requirements.

Communication Skills

Good communication skills are a prime indicator of whether or not a candidate will make a good fit within an organisation. A huge part of communication involves listening. During an interview, observe whether or not the candidate is listening and paying attention to the interviewer. Are they interrupting the interviewer? Are their eyes glazing over?

Verbal cues are also an important part of good communication. For example, when asking a candidate about a previous career challenge, did they use “I” or “we” more often? This will give you a chance to see if the candidate is a team player and whether or not they take or gives credit where it is deserved.

Also, be sure to observe whether or not the candidate asks you any questions about the company.

Check With References

Reference checks are essential in corroborating and verifying information about a candidate’s work history and experience. A candidate’s job references can also provide a candid window into the kind of person they are at work.

A SkillSurvey study found that, when asked, job candidates’ coworkers give feedback on soft skills for reference checks, while managers focus on tasks related hard skills. So, when checking references, it may be beneficial to assess a candidate’s soft and hard skills based on their relationship to the reference.

During the reference checking process, it may be helpful to ask a candidate’s coworkers questions about the soft skills of the potential hire including:

  • Did the candidate get along with their coworkers and management?
  • Tell me what it’s like to work with the job candidate.
  • What advice can you give me to successfully manage the job candidate?
  • What else do I need to know about the job candidate that I didn’t already ask?

Employees are unlikely to vouch for someone who would make an unpleasant coworker, so ask them for a thoughtful assessment.

Conclusion

Today’s business landscape is about communication, relationships and presenting your organisation in a positive way to the public and potential employees. Soft skills allow organisations to effectively and efficiently use their hard skills, like tech and digital skills, and knowledge without being hampered by interpersonal issues, infighting and poor public and market perceptions.

Recruiting for the right blend of soft skills takes a measured and strategic approach. It also requires an investment of time, patients and gut instinct. Make sure to think carefully about how you can learn more about your candidates as humans interacting with other people.

Preventing Physician Burnout and Reducing Turnover

Posted on by edyson

Exhaustion, stress and anxiety: these are the symptoms of a plague spreading throughout the medical community. Its name? Physician burnout. According to a study conducted by the Annals of Internal Medicine, physician burnout is on the rise and causing major disruptions in healthcare outcomes for both patients and the medical professionals charged with their care.  

In fact, according to the study, it’s estimated that physician burnout adds nearly $5 billion per year to healthcare spending in the United States. Problems such as insufficient care, patient dissatisfaction and malpractice lawsuits are all contributing to the cost of burnout among physicians in the U.S.

In this article, we dive into what physician burnout is, its effects on healthcare and what organisations can do to minimize and combat this troubling trend.

So, What is Physician Burnout?

The term “burnout” can seem like a nebulous catch-all-term for workplace stress and dissatisfaction. So, what makes burnout unique? For starters, burnout is officially a medical condition, according to the World Health Organisation, and is characterised as a persistent state of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. Burnout includes emotional exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from work along with a sense of poor personal accomplishment.

Although it can occur in any profession, incidences of burnout are more common in individuals employed in caring professions such as healthcare, social work, counseling and teaching. Common contributors to physician burnout are long work hours, a fear of being sued and having to navigate the growing healthcare bureaucracy and filling out time-consuming electronic medical records.

“Nearly everything a physician does in 2019 is monitored, rated, assessed and reported. The electronic health record has many benefits but it can also be a burden, adding substantially to the time physicians spend in front of a computer screen while robbing them of what brings them joy: spending time with their patients,” states Dr. Edward Ellison, executive medical director and chairman of the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, in an article released in conjunction with the Annals of Internal Medicine study.

The Effects of Physician Burnout

Physician burnout is not new in the medical field. In a study conducted by the American Medical Association, Stanford and the Mayo Clinic, about 54% of physicians reported having at least one symptom of burnout – nearly double the rate of U.S. workers in 2014[KS1] .

For physicians and their employers, the effects of burnout are taking an enormous toll. Burned-out doctors tend to make more medical errors, and their patients have worse health outcomes and are less satisfied. This can contribute to a loss of reputation and revenue for employers and physicians.

“Physician burnout is known to be associated with increased physician turnover and reduced productivity,” said lead researcher Joel Goh, an assistant professor of analytics and operations at the National University of Singapore. “But the costs in monetary terms are poorly understood.”

The Annals of Internal Medicine study authors calculate that for healthcare organisations, the cost of burnout comes out to $7,600 per physician each year. The study cautions that these cost estimates are conservative, and only calculate lost work hours and physician turnover. What’s more, a survey conducted by the Physicians Foundation of more than 17,000 American physicians found that:

  • 54% rated their morale as “somewhat” or “very” negative about the current state of medicine
  • 63% were “somewhat” or “very” pessimistic about the future of medicine
  • 49% “often” or “always” experience feelings of burnout
  • 49% would not recommend a career in medicine to their children
  • 58% said the least-satisfying aspect of medical practice was too much paperwork and regulation

With such a staggering economic and professional toll, preventing and treating burnout in physicians is crucial to improving patient and organisational outcomes.

Identifying Physician Burnout

All too often, doctors spend far more energy concerned with the health outcomes of their patients, and their own personal health issues go unaddressed and unresolved. 

 
“It is always amazing to me how often burnout is actively ignored in healthcare. Research shows one in three doctors are burned out on any given office day,” remarks Dr. Dike Drummond, a career strategist for physicians who focuses on burnout. He began The Happy MD in response to the emerging burnout epidemic amongst physicians.

Outside of the mental, physical and workplace performance effects experienced by burned-out physicians, an estimated 300 to 400 U.S. physicians take their own lives every year. This number is higher than the suicide rate in the general population by 40% for men and an alarming 130% for women. This makes addressing burnout more than a financial or business imperative, but also one of great moral importance.

Because burnout is a slow and gradual process that increases over time, it does not happen from one day to the next. Instead, it can sneak up on physicians and their employers if both are not paying close attention to the warning signs. Below are some of the symptoms to be on the lookout for when combating burnout:

Physical Signs

  • Feeling tired and drained
  • Lower immunity
  • Frequent headaches, back pain, muscle aches
  • Change in appetite or sleep habits

Emotional Signs

  • Emotional exhaustion
  • Detachment from patients or de-personalisation
  • Sense of failure and self-doubt
  • Feeling helpless, trapped or defeated
  • Loss of motivation
  • Increased cynicism
  • Decreased sense of accomplishment

Behavioral Signs

  • Withdrawing from responsibilities
  • Isolation from others
  • Procrastination
  • Using food, drugs or alcohol to cope
  • Taking out your frustration on others
  • Skipping work or increased tardiness

Understanding the symptoms and behaviors associated with burnout can help your organisation better intervene with physicians and help them identify and understand the emotional burden they are experiencing.

Managing Physician Burnout

Organisation-led initiatives and interventions are sadly few and far between for many physicians, leaving them on their own to manage and treat the symptoms of burnout. This can make it more difficult to manage stress and the emotions that come from working in healthcare. However, this does not need to be the case. Healthcare organisations can take steps to help physicians reduce the risk or severity of burnout.

One strategy is encouraging medical professionals to acknowledge feelings of burnout or exhaustion when they occur and providing assistance whenever and wherever possible. What’s more, promoting the following strategies can help your physicians to decompress and clear their minds:

Physical Activities

This can be accomplished through physical activities such as spending time at the gym, running, walking, cycling or yoga to name a few.

Personal Activities

Others include meditation, mindfulness, reading for pleasure, developing a hobby, going to the movies or spending time in a museum. These activities can be pursued alone; however, when combined with a partner, family members or friends, social interaction can enhance the restful nature of these activities.

Time Off

Another essential approach to reducing and managing burnout is for physicians to spend time away from work. Regularly scheduled vacation time helps reduce fatigue by allowing the mind and body a break from the daily grind.

Your organisation’s workplace culture can also play a part in reducing burnout. An important step in battling burnout is managing time and respecting limits. When dealing with emotionally exhausted physicians, consider reducing the number of patients they see or the number of new patients taken on, if possible.

Conclusion

Burnout is common and affects a significant number of physicians at all stages of their careers. It is a consequence of an exceptionally motivated, high-performing, competitive and perfectionistic personality combined with a fast-paced high-stakes profession that is practicing medicine.

While burnout manifests in individuals, it is fundamentally a response to organisational culture and work life. Recognition of, and willingness to address, these specific stressors will allow individuals and healthcare organisations to better prevent or alleviate physician burnout.