Your soft skills or how to be effective working from home
Hello friends! Let’s talk about the most underrated today, about soft skills.
The phrase, which until recently thundered in every news line (“after the pandemic, the world will never be the same”), and threatened the future, has now firmly entered our reality. In the conditions of a lockdown, all IT guys switched to a remote work format, which confidently began to demand new soft skills or a significant improvement of those we already have.
In fact, that means we’re no longer the same office-workers. And since many people still continue working remotely, it’s worth talking about the skills required to work effectively from their home offices. What soft skills you should have for remote work:
- To be a team player and have a team spirit. That’s the main skill regardless of the work format.
- To be convincing and assertive — at any time you need to be able to express your opinion with confidence, and even so that you can be heard, and especially remotely.
- To be able to manage conflicts — at a distance, the situation is much more tense, so you need to be able to resolve disagreements, and it is better to negotiate effectively, without bringing them up — whether it is a meeting with management or communication with the customer.
- To be original and creative — pandemic and post-pandemic time is a time to surprise and think fresh.
- Critical thinking — analyzing and justifying your conclusions is more important than ever.
- To be able to think dynamically — the situation changes very quickly, for example, on a project — be able to think energetically and quickly adapt to the situation, find the right solutions.
- Inspirational leadership — is an important skill of a team player to inspire with ideas and encourage others to implement them, contributing to the achievement of common goals. Closely overlaps with the skill of Influential leadership.
- To be able to see the perspective — each question or idea should be considered in a wide range to see their further application and development.
- To be able to solve problems — both in traditional ways and with the new approaches.
- To be productive despite pressures and deadlines.
- To be able to build relationships — yes, you need to be able to do this with colleagues, leaving aside “personal likes and dislikes”, remember point number 3.
- To be able to conduct self-assessment — to analyze yourself, your weaknesses, this is perhaps a very valuable quality in any work sphere and any format.
All these skills turned out to be invaluable when our offices moved to our houses. The crisis situation in most companies showed the “human side” of the process, and technical skills sometimes even receded into the background. But the “hard” time has left us only partially, the hybrid or remote form of the workflow has firmly entered our lives and, probably, will never leave, which means that “soft” skills should not be underestimated.