Why soft skills are the future of organizations

The world of work, the relationship organizations have with their employees, as well as the relationship employees have with organizations, is changing fast. Before, when an employee took on a job in an organization, this represented a long-term relationship. Employees made a commitment to the organization, to focus all their time and energy on the business. In turn, the organizations promised to take care that employees had all their needs covered.

For organizations, interacting with a changing world requires human skills.

Today it is increasingly rare for an employee to seek a long-term commitment to an organization. And it is increasingly clear to organizations that when they hire someone new, their relationship with them will not be for life, as it would have been only a few decades ago. At that time, our role when we took a job in an organization was basically to keep our heads down and do what we were asked. The type of skills that organizations needed were rather technical and specialized — marketing, sales, operations, distribution, finance.

But the future of work is very different from what was outlined then. The skills that professionals and organizations need to develop to excel in this ever faster world are entirely different. The type of capabilities we will need to get ahead in the future are more human — curiosity and continuous learning, self-awareness and self-knowledge, entrepreneurial mindset, accountability for the results of our work, or empathy and understanding towards human needs.

All people have what are called soft skills: We all grew up learning to express our emotions, to form friendships, to want to know ourselves better. Despite the stereotype of the cold and competitive business world, entrepreneurs are not sociopaths. But that stereotype has an obvious origin: unfortunately, the organizations we work for do not usually promote these human skills. It is still rare for companies to bother to deliberately create an environment where we feel confident and relaxed enough to be ourselves.

But organizations with future vision are changing, and they are promoting the development and application of this more human, softer skillset. What are the reasons why soft skills have become so important in organizations?

The accelerated pace and pervasiveness of communication has pushed us to a whole new level of transparency. In the post-social networks world, it is no longer enough for an organization to merely say that it has a mission and values. This new transparency forces us to truly live our purpose and demonstrate our values with actions. We cannot proclaim collaboration and transparency as values without creating work environments where people can be more human.

Another reason organizations begin to create more human work environments is because competition is getting worse for recruiting greater talent for our organization. We are reaching a hiring war. Attracting and retaining the brightest people has become a challenge, and new generations prefer to work in organizations with warmer and more human work environments. For these workers, it is not enough to offer a good salary and benefits. Talented people seek to live experiences, develop their potential and work for an organization with an inspiring purpose. Our professional and personal lives are getting more and more mixed, and this forces companies around the world to accept and promote a warmer attitude at work.

On the other hand, technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation threaten to replace the mechanical and repetitive work that humans used to do. This is not as big a reason to panic as it would seem: the truth is that the jobs most vulnerable to automation are monotonous and routine. What technology cannot replace is our ability to empathize, connect, communicate and collaborate with others. The concept of soft skills at work is not something that companies promote only because it is nice or even ethical, but because adopting these kinds of skills will allow us to survive and excel in the future.

Organizational soft skills

1. Curiosity and continuous learning. If once it was enough to get a bachelor’s degree, maybe a master’s, to become a company man, that era is over. The world changes too fast, and our knowledge and skills become obsolete if we do not strive to keep them up to date. New generations have a very personal hunger to learn and develop, to acquire new knowledge and skills.
2. Self-awareness and knowledge. We are more vulnerable to changing conditions the less we understand ourselves. Having a clear idea of their strengths and weaknesses helps each individual cope better with the challenges of an unpredictable world. Attracting that resilient talent requires companies to foster an environment where people can develop that knowledge without being branded arrogant for knowing their strengths or punishing them for knowing their weaknesses and taking the time to improve them.
3. Entrepreneurial mindset. In a world where the average life of our services has dropped from 20 to 4 years, we need to, as the cliché goes, “stay hungry”. All organizations, large and small, need to become more entrepreneurial, and to combine our exploitation, productivity and efficiency efforts with efforts to explore future growth territories.
4. Accountability. A culture of responsibility, at all levels of a business, makes it a fair organization. Good results are rewarded and bad ones are promptly remedied. Asking our employees for results, rather than a given number of work hours, or adherence to a particular protocol, involves them in the success of the organization — and urges them to face their failures.
5. Empathy and understanding of others. Identifying unmet human needs is key to being competitive; It is what allows us to develop more significant and relevant products and services. And finding these needs, grasping why they are important, and why they have not been met yet, is an exercise in understanding each other and putting ourselves in their place. Empathy is a primary human ability to be a healthy and functional individual — and the same is true for organizations.