When you are searching for the right candidate who fits well with your organization, you look for a lot more than just their technical skills. You also look for the candidates’ soft skills.
While it is true that listing the technical skills and certifications is easy, but is important to highlight their soft skills as well. It takes a lot more than hard skills to succeed in a career. It also takes great personality traits, an abstract mindset, and effective interpersonal skills.
And yet, many times, because of a lack of resources and budgets, the first to be cut is the soft skills of employees.
This is often a result of the difficulty that managers face in regards to proving the effectiveness and ROI of soft skills training.
So, how exactly do you end up with the data that proves the impact and effectiveness of your soft skills training? Let’s find out.
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Measure engagement rates
The one way to measure the ROI of your soft skills training initiatives has to be how engaging the audience was. To do this, you can track the usage and engagement rates of your learners.
This process can become a lot easier for you when you have a learning management system in place. With an LMS, you can measure the dedication of your employees. See how frequently they logged in, how many times did they log-in outside of the office hours, were the courses completed promptly, check their attendance for workshops, etc.
There are many LMS that are now available in the market. You can check out Absorb LMS to get yourself one of the best ones out there. Absorb LMS Features include reporting and attendance tracker that makes it easy for you to measure engagement rates.
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Take feedback from employees
It is true that getting feedback can often make one nervous but it is also vital. When you do not take feedback, you will not be able to find any areas of improvement and the training will eventually lose its purpose. Thus, further making it difficult to measure the ROI of your soft skills training initiatives.
Interviewing and surveying your audience is one of the best ways to measure the success of your training program.
You can also make your survey in the form of an assessment. If your employee performs well, you will understand that your training worked well. If not, figure out or ask them what lacked, make the changes, and repeat the cycle.
It is the best way to gather the necessary data.
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Measure staff turnover
When an employee becomes a part of the organization, it is important to take steps that will help them keep motivated to stay with the organization.
One factor that acts as a huge aspect in this decision is the potential growth of an employee.
When you measure and compare your staff turnover before and after you have initiated soft skills training and the results are phenomenal, you will know that your training worked in their favor.
When you invest in the career development of employees and they know that it is working for them, they are more likely to prolong their stay with the organization.
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Measure change in productivity
Productivity is what helps businesses grow. When employees are not productive, the targets won’t be achieved. This does not work in the favor of an organization. Ever.
One of the best ways to check for the ROI of your training is to track the productivity rates of employees. A few soft skills that have a direct impact on the productivity of employees are creative-thinking, organization, multitasking, and proactivity.
These soft skills often have a positive and direct impact on the performance of employees. You can check for the productivity rates by identifying and monitoring the success rates of the company’s goals – both long term and short term.
Conclusion
Soft skills training might be a little tricky to measure but it is still crucial to an organization. Share with us your best method of measuring the success of your soft skills training programs.
