Interpersonal SkillsPriority for Organizational Agility

The Imperative to Improve Employee Engagement

As expectation for technical fluency increases – artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, cyber security and robotics – employees must continue to advance their interpersonal skills to thrive in this age of automation and digitization. Across industry and government, organizational leaders are recognizing the imperative for enterprise-wide retraining and reskilling of their workforce, augmenting technical skills with interpersonal skills that accelerate employee engagement, revitalize organizational agility and interpret the complexity of major technology integrations.

Five Critical Investments for Improved Employee Engagement –

Organizational leaders seeking to improve collaboration, accelerate organizational agility and foster a creative, problem-solving mindset, should consider the following initiatives –

Foster appreciation for a diverse and multi-generational workforce
Stimulate employees’ Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
Develop opportunities and environments to advance critical thinking
Enable communication strategies that quickly mitigate problems
Prioritize employee commitment to delivering value to the customer

Where to Start? Explore our Interpersonal Skills Training Framework to learn how to successfully achieve organizational agility.

View Interpersonal Skills Training Framework ›

Improving Employee Engagement and Organizational Agility

In today’s complex environment, organizational agility – the capability of an organization to renew and adapt in response to marketplace turbulence – can only be achieved when employee trust and employee collaboration are high. As employee trust increases, employee engagement improves. As employee engagement improves, organizational agility matures, and unified teams begin delivering value more consistently and effectively despite market pressures.

Here are five areas of investment to achieve organizational agility through improved employee engagement:

Cultural, Generational and Gender Unity

In the past, like-minded teams could function in a silo. Work today, however, is performed by cross-functional, globally diverse and multi-generational team members that are delivering value with diversity of thought and style. This cognitive diversity improves employee and customer engagement. Recognition and appreciation of the value derived from teams representing diverse backgrounds – gender, ethnicity, generational and personality (introverts and extroverts) – is imperative within organizations that are collapsing silos and hierarchies, thus accelerating collaboration across multi-disciplinarian team structures.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) – being aware of how one’s emotion can influence the behavior of oneself and others, positively or negatively – is becoming a critical organizational asset in recruiting and retaining top talent. Organizations must continually invest in their organizational EQ to enable improved change management, agile collaboration and accelerate trust between employees and their leadership.

Critical Thinking

In a professional environment fraught with complexity, it is no longer acceptable to simply think about the problem. Expectations now require teams to critically think about the root cause of their challenges and eventual solutions, thereby creating longer term value, rather than short term fixes. A culture that systemically embraces and invests in critical thinking can mitigate biased or uninformed thinking that is costly to customer satisfaction and organizational agility.

Problem-solving Communication Strategies

Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) cites that ‘Soft Skills’ – “which are needed to effectively communicate, problem solve, collaborate and organize – are becoming more important for success as the workplace evolves socially and technologically.” As today’s professional environment routinely presents productivity impediments, employees need modern skills, tact and methodologies that provide the confidence in mitigating these difficult barriers. This mindset is becoming one of the most competitive differentiators for global organizations.

Customer Centricity

Business and government leaders are rapidly recognizing the risks associated with delivering a poor consumer experience given consumers’ accessibility to expansive social media platforms. Organizations are investing in interpersonal and professional skills to better understand customer experience and customer satisfaction, and then create optimal strategies, processes and initiatives to deliver it. Customers and consumers want value, and they want it now.

Interpersonal Skills Required to Achieve Organizational Agility and Professional Excellence

Explore our interactive Interpersonal Skills Training Framework below:

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How to Improve Interpersonal Skills and Organizational Agility

Recognizing interpersonal skills as a crucial skill set to achieve expected outcomes is an important first step. Contact Learning Tree – a global leader in supporting organizations that seek to gain the right skills, for the right people accountable to serving your customers and stakeholders. We’ll get you in touch with our team of expert leadership consultants who are qualified to listen, learn and support your workforce development needs.

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