Focusing on the Soft Skills Leads to Better Employee Engagement
As an industrial engineer and project manager, I was taught to think in a strategic way. Always process oriented and efficient in every way – from communication and budget, to eliminating scrap and minimizing idle time. Yet, I also consider myself as having a fun, informal and open personality, so this has helped me a great deal in sharing the soft skills that are integral to my role at Wovenware.
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I was recently promoted to senior customer success manager, and as part of my role, I’m working to help our employees hone their own soft skills. Companies tend to focus on technical training and give little importance to these soft skills – such as empathy, understanding, communication and collaboration. As previously stated, soft skills don’t come easily to everyone, and they require study, patience, and continuous practice. See below for some of the ways that specific soft skills can be nurtured.
“Balancing operational efficiency with soft skills has helped me lead and mentor others and hopefully influence them in positive ways, through empathy. I strive to have healthy and strong relationships with employees, peers, and management. I am fortunate that these soft skills come rather easy to me, but I am very certain that it’s not the case for everyone.”
Aixa Boothby
Customer Success Manager
Communication
One of the first things I’ve accomplished in my role is to prepare and conduct various soft skill training sessions. My first course was on how to write a good email (no one teaches you that; you learn with experience). While it seems so basic, it’s something that employees should teach to staff before they have difficult experiences that can be difficult to reconcile. I’m not saying that we should teach them everything, after all, experience and how to manage difficult situations is part of growing as a person and as a professional. It’s important, however, to at least give employees the tools to make better decisions. Writing emails is an everyday task for almost everyone (even if you don’t work as a professional).
Getting a message across is much more difficult in writing than in speaking, so we decided to start giving all our employees a simple and fun presentation on how to write efficient emails. I sent out a survey to each person that has taken the course, and the results impressed me. One hundred percent of people that answered the survey said that they learned something new (from people with little experience, to those with more than ten years of experience). I felt enormous satisfaction, so this gave me the confidence to start creating more team soft skill training sessions.
Another communication skill that is critical but challenging is creating presentations. This is something that does not come easily to me. While I’ve taken courses and worked to finesse my presentations, I know I can do better. I see my husband’s presentations, and my top managers’ presentations, and I’m convinced I just don’t have it in my DNA, although I will keep working on improving it. To help the Wovenware staff, as well as myself, I created live, in-person training sessions for the team instead of remote courses and presentations. This has helped bring people back to the office, engage face to face and even share a few laughs together. While Wovenware has grown so much and we’re bursting out of our office space, being together and growing together with a shared purpose is still crucial.
Problem Solving
Other team sessions that I’ve initiated relate to building trust, efficient communication, mindfulness, and teaching employees all about the 5 Why’s. The 5 Whys problem solving technique is an iterative interrogative process used to identify the cause-and-effect relationships of a problem. It aims to determine the root cause of that problem by repeatedly asking “Why?” five times. These qualities are expected from every employee, but as we race to meet customer needs and complete projects, they’re often not articulated.
Creativity
I am usually a creative person, but I have noticed that when I really need to be creative, I get stuck and frustrated. I put so much pressure on myself to make creativity fun and different, but I need to do a lot of research for ideas to start flowing. There are many LinkedIn learning courses that can inspire creativity and I have taken a few which I have loved, since they are short and straight to the point. But even with these courses, I have spent weeks trying to inspire creativity around a specific subject, yet feeling stuck. Just when that happens, sometimes ideas come from nowhere — just like that, something happens, or someone says something and the ideas just start flowing.
At Wovenware, as a software engineering and AI company, we’re used to a fast paced, execution-oriented workstyle, and I’m sure others in the industry share my feeling that spending time just simply thinking can feel like wasted time and “not really working.” That thinking is clearly false. Thankfully, I have great mentors that ask me good questions that make me think. They have taught me that the creative process is like that, and that I should not feel ashamed or inefficient. Believe me, it has taken a lot of practice, patience, and self-soothing to feel better while I am in the process of creating something new for our company.
Honing the soft skills, through employee engagement and employee experience are tough things to achieve in any industry or workplace. You may ask yourself, what does all of this have to do with customer success, and the answer is simple. The better employee satisfaction and empathy we have, the better experience our customers have – which is the key to business growth.
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