Soft Skills Training in the Workplace: It’s Time to Soften Up

Soft skills training allows employees to work and interact more effectively with others in the workplace. Every organization can put its employees in a position to be successful in their roles by ensuring that they are equipped with the necessary skills, and soft skills are no exception. 

Choosing the right soft skills training platform and creating a good plan for developing soft skills is important for workplace success. In this article, we will explain:

• what soft skills training signifies;
• why it’s beneficial;
• how it can improve employee productivity;
• the best ways to train your employees in soft skills;
• how to put soft skills training online.

What is Soft Skills Training?

Soft skills training is important training that allows employees to learn and improve their non-technical or personal skills.

These involve how employees interact with others, including being able to communicate effectively, collaborate with team members, be flexible, and understand and manage their emotions. 

When you provide soft skills training, it helps employees both personally and professionally, and this is important for businesses that want to have a strong workforce. It not only helps employees advance in their careers, but also plays an essential role in helping businesses succeed.

Benefits of Soft Skills Training

Any business that wants to improve the capabilities and efficiency of its workforce should consider investing in soft skills training.

There are many other organizational benefits to be gained from corporate soft skills training, such as:

• Improved customer service. This could be considered the most obvious benefit of improving soft skills in the workplace. Your employees will be able to actively listen more effectively to establish your customers’ needs, identify problems, and help them resolve them. They are also likely to have more compassion and empathy after the enhancement of soft skills, which can have a huge positive impact on customer service. 
• Increased sales. Employee soft skills training 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 important professional boundaries, and your customers will definitely appreciate this. When employees take additional time to discuss the pain points that their clients experience and match them with the right solution, the sale will result almost by itself.
• Employee retention. Your organization will retain more talent because you’ve invested in their professional growth. You will also reduce the need to hire and train replacement staff, thus reducing organizational costs.
• Innovation and creativity. Professional soft skills training can enhance employees’ ability to think innovatively and creatively, resulting in new concepts, products, and services. It can also help employees have a growth mindset, making them inclined to welcome change, face risk with more confidence, and view failures as chances for learning and personal development.
• Employee morale. Soft skills training in the workplace often promotes a culture that values recognition and appreciation. When companies offer soft skills training for employees, they feel appreciated for their work and perceive that the company is interested in their growth. As a result, this greatly improves employees’ morale and creates a positive culture within the organization.
• Behavioral development. Taking soft skills classes can enhance employees’ personal growth and behavioral development. It leads to the improvement of qualities like emotional intelligence, self-assurance, and flexibility, all of which can greatly influence an employee’s effectiveness and achievements in a professional setting.
• Productivity. Through soft skills training, employees can better handle the challenges of the workplace, make the work environment better for everyone, and be more productive overall.

What Are Soft Skills Exactly? 

By definition, soft skills tend to be more personality-focused, as opposed to being based on qualifications, technical skills, or vocational experience. That includes things like people skills, social skills, interpersonal skills, and transferable skills.

Soft skills vs. hard skills: what’s the difference?

By contrast to soft skills, hard skills are technical skills that are often specific to one’s job. They result from certification programs or academic degrees, employee training, and work experience and can be taught, measured, and tested through exams and practical assignments or quizzes. 

Hard skills tend to relate to the core business of an organization, such as writing skills, computer networking skills, machine operation, business analysis, design, and construction. Soft skills deal more with interpersonal relationships and involve things like conflict resolution, communication, listening, and problem-solving.

In short, these are some key differences between hard skills and soft skills:

Soft skills development training is often underestimated and not given due importance. Plus, while hard skills can be learned and mastered over time and with repetition, soft skills can be harder to develop and more difficult to evaluate accurately.

The Top 8 Soft Skills for Developing Employee Performance

Investing in online soft skills training for employees has numerous benefits that go beyond personal development and have a positive impact on team dynamics and overall organizational success. LinkedIn recently published a study on the Soft Skills to Master in 2024, and it emphasizes the importance of soft skills in helping people advance their careers in 2024.

After considering various soft skills training programs, we selected the ones with the most valuable soft skills that you should consider training your employees in and have listed them further on in this article. 

Here are some examples of soft skills training:

1. Leadership

2. Communication

3. Teamwork

4. Time management

5. Problem solving

6. Critical thinking

7. Emotional Intelligence

8. Conflict resolution

The problem is that many people still think of these types of skills as innate qualities rather than something that can be learned – they consider that a person is either born with them or not. Fortunately, nothing could be further from the truth, as all of the most in-demand soft skills can be trained and developed.

The Best Ways to Train Your Employees
on Soft Skills

There are several options for delivering soft skills development training to your workforce. You can offer online courses for soft skills or you can add relevant soft skill sections to your existing course content. In terms of soft skills training methods, consider using some of those outlined below for soft skills training programs for employees.

1. Gamification

Employers can empower their employees to actively participate and develop their skills by utilizing gamification in soft skills training. This can be achieved by creating interactive scenarios that mirror the kinds of situations your employees might face in the real world. 

This might include situations at work, dealing with clients, or group assignments. However, the situations must be adequate to help them develop their soft skills. This innovative approach creates an immersive and enjoyable learning environment for employees.

2. Soft skills assessment with 360-degree feedback surveys

An employee’s performance can be evaluated through a 360-degree feedback assessment. This assessment involves receiving feedback from employees themselves, their subordinates, peers, and supervisors about their performance at work. 

Before you begin, clearly define the soft skills that you want to assess, whether they are communication, leadership, emotional intelligence, creative thinking, problem-solving, conflict resolution, or others. 

The 360-degree feedback assessment can help employers monitor the progress that their employees are making in developing their soft skills regularly. After the assessment has been conducted, you can have a one-on-one session with employees to discuss the results. 

The results obtained from the 360-degree assessment can be used to identify new areas of improvement and thus provide training tailored to the needs identified in the assessment.

3. Story-based learning

To teach important lessons and ideas about soft skills, story-based learning uses narratives or various storytelling techniques. Stories are a great way to learn because they have a major impact on how people think and feel. 

Through interesting stories, employees can connect with characters, understand what they’re going through, and learn more about different soft skills and how to use them. Story-based learning helps people remember and understand things better, which lets them internalize and use soft skills ideas at work and in their personal lives.

4. Role-plays

By putting employees in different situations, role plays allow them to practice and improve their soft skills. They can see things from different perspectives and connect with one another more realistically by taking on different roles. 

Role-plays provide employees with opportunities to receive immediate feedback, reflect on what occurred, and learn from their mistakes. They also help employees to be more creative and flexible because they must change how they act and react depending on the roles they play.

5. Coaching/mentoring

Coaching/mentoring is especially effective in imparting soft skills such as communication and leadership. It can be divided into two parts: peer-to-peer learning (knowledge sharing among employees) and coaching (with a professional mentor).

Employers can launch a peer forum in which employees will discuss soft skills in the workplace and how to achieve their full potential. They will have a chance to ask questions and share stories to get peer-based feedback. For instance, an employee encountered a particularly difficult customer who got on their nerves. They can share their experience on the forum, discuss it with colleagues, and get useful advice for the future. 

Employers can bring in a coach for an employee who needs soft skills learning for leadership. You can consider bringing in a mentor or coach and tailoring a learning approach that’s specific and targeted. The coaching process in the workplace typically involves collaboration with the employee to identify, target, and plan for better performance.

This is how it works: A coach defines the employee’s goals, existing skill sets, strengths, and, of course, weaknesses. For example, if an employee discovers they can’t communicate with their supervisors effectively, a coach creates a development plan and a clear path to improve their communication skills. When an employee is on their way to implementing this strategy, a coach supports them and provides them with actionable feedback. 

6. Live interactive workshops

If you want to train an entire group of employees in a specific soft skill, you can organize a live soft skills workshop. The best workshops have a concrete, action-oriented purpose and aim to find answers to current problems in the field. 

If you want to teach your customer service staff how to resolve conflicts with clients, you can work out role-play scenarios and play them out right in the soft skills training workshop. Let the supervisor or L&D 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 identify the ways to improve customer service.

7. Online learning

In the current global climate, providing soft skills training online totally makes sense. Employees can take online soft skills courses while working from home or anywhere else on any device. 

You could buy some ready-made soft skills courses from online learning platforms such as LinkedIn Learning or Udemy. After your employees have completed these courses, they can get a soft skills certification.

A soft skills certification helps employees prove that they have completed a soft skills course and showcase the skills they have gained. But how will your employees consolidate their acquired skills in practice? And how will you check that your colleagues got value from the training?

A great way to address both issues and do online soft skills training that adds real value is dialogue simulation. It’s perfect for teaching business communication skills and other similar competencies. 

A dialogue simulation is an online interaction that simulates an actual conversation with a person, such as a customer, another staff member, or a stakeholder. This is similar to role-play scenarios that we’ve discussed when talking about live workshops, but sims are automated and don’t require the involvement of other people. 

This is what a dialogue simulation created with the iSpring Suite authoring tool looks like. Sign up for a free 14-day trial and make an infinite number of role-plays like this.

The main thing is that they can help employees master communication skills with no risk to the business until they’re ready to test them in the real world. Besides, unlike live workshops, there’s no need to gather all the trainees in one place and spend enormous amounts of time on individual practice. Dialogue simulations allow tens and even hundreds of professionals to practice when and where they wish.

A key feature of a good dialogue simulation is the use of branching scenarios, wherein each decision the employee makes has consequences. This ensures that everything works like it would in an actual interaction between two people.

Authoring tools like iSpring Suite make creating dialogue simulations very simple and quick, and allow branching scenarios to be added without complex coding.

8. AR/VR

Augmented and virtual reality can also be very effective ways to develop soft skills in employees. These tools allow organizations to replicate real-life scenarios that employees might face and train them on the best way to react in those situations. 

For instance, you can replicate scenarios in a virtual world in which an employee has to reply with empathy to a co-worker experiencing difficulty in their personal lives. Or you can recreate a situation when a manager needs to give critical feedback to their staff.

A great example of VR training for soft skills is the ‘CoPilot’ program developed by Talespin.

Talespin’s CoPilot platform allows you to use virtual people with social and emotional intelligence that are powered by artificial intelligence to teach interpersonal skills.

How to Conduct Soft Skills Training Online

By now you may be wondering what the quickest and easiest way to get the best soft skills training online is, so let’s run through a quick step-by-step process.

Step 1: Identify the necessary soft skills

Establishing the precise skills that align with the objectives of your company and the specific requirements of your workforce is a vital step to take before beginning online training for soft skills.

Step 2: Perform necessary prework

This step will depend on which methodology and soft skills training software you’re using, but in general, at this stage, you should identify your learning objectives and define what should be covered in the course. Plus, decide how you will make the vision a reality – which authoring tool you will use.

Step 3: Create courses 

This part of the process will depend on what type of training courses you want to create and the software tool you decide to choose. Easy-to-use eLearning authoring tools like iSpring Suite are ideal for creating the slide-based courses, quizzes, video tutorials, and dialogue simulations we’ve covered above. 

To create a conversation simulation quickly and easily with iSpring, simply follow the steps described in this article.

Step 4: Deploy courses through an LMS

When you’ve finished creating your soft skills course, the next decision to make is how to publish and share it. Most organizations prefer to deliver their training via an LMS like iSpring Learn, which allows for the easy tracking of results and completions, and the flexibility of using any eLearning format you want. However, you can also share your course on your corporate website/intranet or email it to your employees.

Step 5: Encourage continuous learning

By continuously providing opportunities for training in soft skills, you can foster an environment that values lifelong education. To maintain employees’ interest in their professional development, this may include advanced modules, refresher courses, or periodic updates.

Final Thoughts

The commitment to soft skills development training demonstrates a forward-thinking approach to talent development, recognizing that success in the modern workplace requires more than just technical knowledge. 

As employees continue to improve and utilize their soft skills, organizations become more capable of thriving during challenging times and achieving long-term success.

Does your organization have a soft skills training plan? If so, what methods do you use to deliver the training, and how effective has it been? We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.