The transition from pandemic to endemic has created a hybrid work environment. Remote working has become the new normal. As a result of this new norm, the previous soft skills knowledge gap is redefined, and the skills needed for the future of work are re-examined.
Soft skills include leadership, team building, communication, and problem-solving, among other cognitive and socio-emotional abilities. But today, they are not considered part of digital literacy. It is essential to have digital soft skills to engage with each other in the hybrid workplace using digital tools. Digital soft skills are thus becoming ever more critical as engaging digitally becomes the norm.�
The earlier people master these new skills, the better prepared they will be for future hybrid work. Soft skills are character traits and interpersonal skills that characterize a person’s relationships with other people. In the workplace, soft skills are considered to be a complement to hard skills, which refer to a person’s knowledge and occupational skills.
Are Digital Soft Skills Important?
Digital soft skills are vital for leadership in a hybrid workplace. Let me start by exploring digital leadership. We should first agree on leadership: a leader sets a vision, inspiring others to perform at their best. This means we should explore performance assessment, inspiration, and setting a vision change when working digitally.
A leader must understand people and build trust to inspire. I am a great fan of situational leadership, an empathetic way to evaluate someone’s needs to excel. In hybrid jobs, understanding someone and building trust can be difficult. Traditional leaders could solve this issue by having more team meetings. This is the most significant error a digital leader could make in a hybrid workplace where multitasking is the most common practice and attention is a rare commodity.
What Is Hybrid Working?
Hybrid working is a people-first strategy for managing the workforce that boosts output and job satisfaction while tackling the main drawbacks of remote work, including isolation and a lack of community. Employees who work under a hybrid work model have more freedom to work from home or anywhere they can be competent.
With hybrid work, the office is no longer confined to a building’s four walls; instead, it is a network of people working in coworking spaces from their homes and workplaces. Team members can move between locations as needed to perform the tasks. The hybrid work paradigm can take on several shapes depending on the firm and the work being done. Workers must be able to solve problems, get things done, and work with teams throughout the organization. Soft skills are essential in every phase of your career. You need to stay current on these skills. Always find ways to improve it since�soft skills for a resume can help you get ahead in your career.
Hybrid Workplace Soft Skills Every Employee Should Have
Soft-skill-equipped workers who can use their knowledge and technical expertise without letting interpersonal conflicts or negative market views get in the way of their work. They are essential if we are to grow in our careers. Below are some soft skills you need to get ahead in your career.
1. Resilience, stress tolerance & flexibility
2. Emotional intelligence
3. Communication using digital platforms
4. Collaboration and creativity
1. Resilience, stress tolerance & flexibility
Our capacity to endure challenges and recover fully and reasonably quickly from trying experiences is called resilience. The level at which we can consistently and successfully handle stressful situations is known as our stress tolerance. Finally, flexibility, which in this instance refers to the capacity to alter with the environment. Together, these factors make grit a powerful predictor of success. Grit is the capacity to persevere through difficult or unpleasant circumstances courageously.
2. Emotional Intelligence
As an employee, you need to have the ability to control your own emotions. You might have to face challenges that affect your emotional thinking. You must assess and manage emotions and build meaningful professional relationships in such situations. Connecting with others to foster trust and collaboration is imperative for leaders who make an impact not only with their knowledge, skills, and experience but also through influencing and motivating.�
3. Communication using digital platforms
Speaking carefully and intelligently, paying close attention when others are speaking, and being a team member with leadership potential are all aspects of professional communication skills. With the transition to remote working, we must adjust our working hours around caring and family needs. By communicating primarily using technology instead of face-to-face, we unwittingly exposed the gaps in our communication tools.
Bridging these gaps might require minor process changes, like remembering to write things down for absent team members or more complex behavioural changes to help other team members feel more included. However, as we look towards the future of work, these are challenges that organizations will need to solve if they expect to successfully navigate the transition to hybrid or remote-first cultures.
You can make use of digital platforms for communication. The choice of platform is crucial for enhancing communication in a hybrid working environment, and another crucial component is to stay current with the digital tools required.
4. Collaboration and creativity
Creativity is more than just being able to draw amazing pictures or write thought-provoking short stories. Creative people can look at a problem and think of new ways to solve it that often seem off the wall at first glance. They are fearless in taking a risk during the thinking and brainstorming phase.�
To gauge the creativity skills of a potential hire, consider sharing a current challenge that the company is looking to solve and ask the candidate how they would approach the problem. Please focus on something other than the solution’s viability but on their thought process and originality.
To Conclude
Even after the pandemic, many companies prefer to continue to adopt the remote working policy. Now that the pandemic has become endemic, we are left with a hybrid workplace. Soft skills knowledge gaps have been redefined in this new normal, and we have to rethink the skills we need for the future of work. Soft skills typically include leadership, team building, communication and problem-solving, among other cognitive and socio-emotional skills.�
But today, we need digital literacy to engage with each other in the hybrid workplace without digital tools. As digital engagement becomes the norm, we are witnessing the rise of a new set of digital soft skills. The earlier people master these new skills, the better prepared they will be for hybrid work in the future.