Is Your Company ‘Soft’ Enough?

In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), soft skills are hard currency. According to more than 11,000 business leaders surveyed in Deloitte’s 2018 Global Human Capital Trends report, future employees’ most sought-after talents won’t be purely technical skills like coding, cybersecurity or blockchain expertise. They will be “essentially human” soft skills like creativity, communication skills and complex problem solving.

Advances in technology may be driving this surge in demand. The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2022, 42% of workplace tasks will be performed by some form of AI or robotic automation. This will free human workers to spend more hours on innovation, collaboration and strategic planning—cognitive tasks that require emotional intelligence (EQ) and people skills.

For companies, hiring workers with high EQ and demonstrable soft skills will be a competitive advantage as AI adoption grows, says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College London (UCL) and Columbia University and chief talent scientist at Manpower Group.

“People who are more emotionally intelligent and more interpersonally skilled have higher career success and higher levels of job performance,” says Chamorro-Premuzic. “Organizations need to hire them or they’ll work for your competitors—and then you’ll lose out.”

Even if workers don’t possess high EQ upon hiring, studies show that, for most adults, soft skills can be taught on the job. And they can be taught to almost everyone: The baseline requirement for successful soft skills training is average—a 90–100 score on the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, which is the range most adults score within—or higher (scores of 101–150). 

For most companies, the investment in developing soft skills and nurturing emotional intelligence pays off. According to a 2017 University of Michigan study, soft skills training boosts productivity and employee retention by 12%, and yields a 256% return on investment.

For businesses across all industries, the question isn’t whether investing in soft skills training is worthwhile; it’s about which approaches will yield the best outcomes.

Empathy From The Top Down

The first challenge for businesses that want to bolster their soft skills strategy is making sure that executives embody emotional intelligence in their leadership style. That tends to boil down to one essential trait: empathy.
That’s the key takeaway of a Development Dimensions International (DDI) study of 15,000 business leaders. By analyzing real behavior in simulated business environments over 10 years, DDI found that leaders who listened to others empathetically performed more than 40% higher than others in overall performance, coaching, planning and organizing, and decision making. Just 4 in 10 leaders today possess proficient or strong empathy.

“People who are more emotionally intelligent and more interpersonally skilled have higher career success and higher levels of job performance. Organizations need to hire them or they’ll work for your competitors—and then you’ll lose out.”

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

“Empathy is stepping into the shoes of other people, and leaders who do that clearly have a competitive advantage,” says Marcel Schwantes, executive coach and founder of the consultancy Leadership from the Core. “It starts with the top. You want somebody who champions the ability to be more empathetic and models that for your company.”
Studies show that empathy is a trainable quality. Neurological scans detect that videos depicting human suffering successfully instill compassion in test subjects. With behavioral psychology–oriented business consultants like The Mind Gym and TalentSmart offering seminars and coaching on how to cultivate workplace empathy, it’s worth giving these consideration, especially since empathy is such a differentiating quality in the age of AI.

Sewing Up Soft Skills

Soft skills don’t just pay off for executives; they add business value among lower-level employees. Case in point: 2,700 garment workers in five clothing factories in Bangalore, India, underwent an intensive 10-month, in-factory soft skills training course to improve job performance. Post-training analysis revealed a boost in productivity that resulted in a 250% return on investment.

“We also found that their supervisors started allocating them harder tasks,” says Namrata Kala, an assistant professor of economics at MIT Sloan who spearheaded the research effort. “In the end, they are more valuable for the firm because they are doing more difficult garment operations.”

And employees benefited as much as employers. A post-program survey of 1,000 workers from the study revealed higher earnings, higher self-esteem and higher aspirations for themselves and their children.

Workshop, Class, Mentor Or Coach?

A host of academic studies reinforce the findings of Kala’s research team: Training programs work. But companies, by and large, aren’t yet investing in soft skills training.
While global spending on training tops $350 billion annually, Chamorro-Premuzic estimates that “10% at most” goes toward soft skills development, with the vast majority focused on tech skills.

Companies can seek outside help to develop soft skills. HR vendors can lead workshops on interpersonal communication, team collaboration and critical problem solving. Online courses from Coursera, edX and uDemy can do the same. 

More hands-on approaches to soft skills training, such as mentorship and coaching, are also gaining traction. Roughly 70% of Fortune 500 companies currently offer mentorship programs, as do 25% of smaller companies. While studies have shown psychosocial benefits for both mentors and protégés, critics assail many mentorship programs as archaic and, at times, gender and racially biased.

Coaching initiatives, meanwhile, are gaining popularity, in part because they are process- and skill-oriented rather than career-focused—which many employees consider a rapidly outmoded mindset in a free-agent labor market. Coaching also has been shown to boost corporate profits, according to the Human Coaching Institute, which reports that organizations with a strong coaching culture rake in higher revenue than their industry peers, 51% versus 38%.

A Soft Skills Health Check

How can companies get started with soft skill development? To determine the right soft skills strategy for your talent pool, Schwantes recommends performing an internal and external health check. “Start with your turnover rate. If people are quitting left and right, that’s very costly,” he says. “Look at your customer satisfaction. Unhappy employees make for unhappy customers.”

Chamorro-Premuzic also points to employee surveys as a powerful tool to detect signs that your company needs soft skills intervention. 

“Upward feedback from employees is a valuable thing,” he explains. “These surveys ask employees things such as ‘I trust my leaders’ or ‘I often get frequent helpful feedback from my boss.’” 

The best intervention, in his view, is hiring employees who bring soft skills with them to the company in the first place. And that is one area where AI may soon help determine who has the cognitive and emotional strengths that will pay dividends for the company.

Among the emerging AI tools that companies are using to assess soft skills in job candidates are neuroscience-based personality testing algorithms. Tesla, LinkedIn and Accenture, for example, ask all potential hires to play a series of 12 games developed by Pymetrics, which can measure 90 cognitive, social and emotional metrics. Another tech startup, HireVue, uses AI to analyze intonation and body language in video interviews for insights into a candidate’s personality.

The use of algorithm-powered hiring tools is growing, with 29% of global business leaders reporting they have previously or are currently using them, according to a Deloitte survey, but it’s worth noting that 71% of executives who have tried them find the current technology “weak.” 

Chamorro-Premuzic agrees that AI soft-skills assessment technology is not robust—yet.
“Up to this day, there is no evidence that AI can assess soft skills better than traditional assessments,” Chamorro-Premuzic says. “But someday it will be able to do it quicker, more efficiently and cheaper.”
CREDITS: Thomas Barwick/Getty

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