Soft skills are essentially the glue that binds the people of an organization together. The stronger these skills are in each person, the stronger your organization is overall. Inside the organization strong soft skills translate to a stress-free, positive, happier, fulfilling environment and promote employee retention. 

Outside the organization, strong soft skills translate to a perception of your organization as reputable, helpful, responsive and responsible promoting customer loyalty and business growth. 

With all this at stake, it is not hard to see why organizations view the improvement of soft skills as vital to their very survival. As with any objective you need a way to show improvement and that requires measuring your progress. But, is it possible to measure improvement in soft skills?

Discover Which Soft Skills Are Important To Your Organization

The hardest part of measuring anything is defining what it is you are actually measuring. Definitions are especially hard when the thing you are measuring is not tangible and subject to interpretation. So it’s easy to understand why talk of measuring soft skills evokes a wide range of often negative emotions from all involved. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Let’s start at the beginning. What is a soft skill? Soft skills are character traits, personal attributes, and interpersonal skills that help a person work and communicate with other people. Examples of soft skills include communication, teamwork, problem-solving, analytical skills, adaptability, strong work ethic, creativity, curiosity, and listening.

You may be thinking that not every job in your organization requires the same set of soft skills, and you’d be right. They don’t. First, you need to identify which soft skills are required for each job. Collecting soft skills information does not need to be a difficult task. More than likely you’ve already defined these skills. 

Start with your job descriptions. While you may discover this is not a complete list it’s a good place to start. By analyzing all your job descriptions you can identify which soft skills are job-specific and which are soft skills you’d like fostered across all levels, up and down, in your organization. You can also improve your list by looking across your organization and identify people who are successful in their roles. Then ask yourself what makes these people successful?

How To Define, Collect, and Measure Soft Skills

To show improvement there needs to be some form of measurement. First, you need a baseline measurement and some way to take periodic measurements all in a consistent, repeatable manner. For this task, many education professionals recommend using a rubric. A rubric defines the scoring guidelines for a multidimensional set or criteria. In our case, one rubric defines the scoring guidelines for one soft skill.

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Now comes the difficult part. Defining each soft skill. Creating the definition for a single soft skill involves listing and defining the major attributes that make up this skill. Remember your matrix has to be usable and consistent across the organization. You cannot expect people to spend hours interpreting your definitions so be concise. To complete the matrix you need to identify some different levels of those attributes and assign an assessment value to them.

Here’s how a matrix for the “problem-solving” skill might look. Skill attributes are listed down the left side of the table with assessment values listed across the top of the table. Each row defines the attribute at the various assessment levels.

Soft skills are rarely discussed in a data-driven way and even when they are feedback is vague. Often times organizations are unaware they have a soft skill deficit. In addition, management usually takes a DIY approach to fix the issue which only compounds the problem. Soft skills matrices provide a way to facilitate constructive conversation and give everyone a common understanding of what and how skills are being evaluated.

Let Technology Do The Heavy Lifting

Have a larger organization? Need a faster way to define, collect, and measure soft skills? Visual Workforce automates the process of collecting hard and soft skills. We develop a live skills inventory that creates standardized skill descriptions across your entire department or organization. Our platform then turns this information into consumable data visualizations that expose key insights instantly. These visualizations help you answer questions such as:

• What are the top soft skills across my organization? 

• What soft skills are common among individual roles? 

• Where are the gaps? Where can we improve? 

Unlike hard skills, soft skills are difficult to learn but essential to long-term success. Therefore it’s imperative that we optimize the ways to define and measure soft skills so that we can create a path to improvement and reap the benefits. What are your organization’s top soft skills? 

Related Post: The Best Way To Identify and Track Your Team’s Hard and Soft Skills