How Does Emergenetics® Support Soft Skills Development?

As businesses adapt to stay relevant and competitive, companies need to follow the human capital trends, which in today’s candidate-driven market are heavily influenced by their employees. Today’s workforce has a keen interest in working for companies that offer opportunities to learn and grow.

• 91 percent of high performers reported that working for an employer that offered learning and development opportunities was important to them (Ceridian)
• 87 percent of millennials rate “professional or career growth and development opportunities” as important to them in a job – and 69 percent of non-millennials agree (Gallup)
• 12 percent of employees feel their employers aid them in their career development (Bridge)

Investing in your training and development offerings is an opportunity to attract and retain top talent and keep your company at the forefront of business.

Soft Skills and Emergenetics®

When it comes to determining the type of training you offer, it’s important to consider what skills employees are interested in building as well as the abilities managers are looking for in their team members. When researching and writing our most recent eBook, we found that data strongly supports the need for soft skills development.

Soft skills are the personal attributes that enable you to effectively interact with others, like communication skills, empathy, adaptability and problem-solving. Although harder to quantify than hard skills like fluency in software programs or proficiency in a foreign language, soft skills can directly impact individual and company success and have become a major focus for businesses.

According to Career Builder, 77 percent of employers believe that soft skills are equally important to hard skills in the workplace. Another study found that just nine percent of HR managers would hire someone with strong technical credentials but weak soft skills.

When surveying more than 4,000 professionals, LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report found the number one priority for developing talent is soft skills training.

Soft skills are highly valued and critical to building a strong company culture and at the same time, it can be a challenge to know where to start. Whether you are interested in enhancing your existing soft skills program or starting from scratch, Emergenetics can support you through:

• Building self-awareness
• Strengthening teams
• Providing ongoing practice

Building Self-Awareness with Emergenetics

Developing strong soft skills begins with understanding yourself. Built on years of psychometric research, the Emergenetics Profile measures a person’s preferences for three Behavioral Attributes (Expressiveness, Assertiveness and Flexibility) and four Thinking Attributes (Analytical, Structural, Social and Conceptual).

This information gives individuals a window into themselves and a language to describe their preferences, helping employees better understand their needs and more effectively utilize their gifts.

Strengthening Teams

The next step to building soft skills is to enhance interpersonal relationships. With the Emergenetics Profile, individuals are able to better understand the ways in which their colleagues prefer to work, which leads to improved communication and an increase in trust. When employees feel valued for their strengths and encouraged to utilize their gifts, you will notice a change in your work environment and productivity.

Providing Ongoing Practice

Developing and honing a new skill takes practice and the same is true with soft skills. We offer several tools to support continued learning including:

• Meeting of the Minds Workshop, which helps individuals and teams realize the importance of each Attribute and identify ways to better interact and work together.
• Power of WE Workshops, which help intact teams address a number of soft skills, including respecting differences, building trust, accelerating performance and supporting innovation and problem solving.
• Emergenetics+ Mobile App, which gives employees customized tips to improve collaboration and communication with colleagues.
• Attributes in Action Tools, which provide tips to managers and employees to help them be more effective in their jobs, such as communicating to the different Attributes, giving feedback, managing disagreements and delivering recognition.

Which programs you use and how you roll them out at your company will depend on your goals. Our team of experts can help you figure out what is right for your organization.

What Comes Next?

We speak with many learning and development professionals that are interested in bringing Emergenetics to their company, yet aren’t sure how to sell the idea to their executive leadership team. When presenting the idea, consider all of the Emergenetics Thinking and Behavioral Attributes to ensure you are engaging everyone. We provide a template in our eBook to help you develop your training proposal.

Offering soft skills training for your employees will help your organization attract and retain top talent as well as provide employees with the tools they need to succeed. Emergenetics can help you build a training program that is both relevant and engaging.

If you are interested in learning more about how Emergenetics’ approach to soft skills can support your talent development needs, download our eBook or fill out the form below for more information.

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