Climbing the rungs of a career ladder is more than just your qualifications. When someone receives an application for a new job, they tend to emphasise their hard skills more than anything else. They talk about the specific knowledge and ability they possess to execute that particular task. However, in the real world, no matter how good your skills are, you’ll cease to exist if you haven’t brushed up on your soft skills.
Though soft skills are difficult to measure or define, they are the interpersonal skills that will shape your ‘workplace well-being’. Today, companies too seek candidates that possess both types of skills when hiring for most positions.
Since it’s your workplace where you spend the maximum amount of your time, it’s important that you feel comfortable, secure, and happy.
To increase well-being at your workplace, there are tons of skills you can build. Though well-being is a subjective term, it usually emerges from your thoughts, experiences and actions on which you have control.
Whether it’s maintaining a work-life balance or finding your purpose, the skills you practice not only create a healthy work environment but also help you increase your performance to a significant level.
5 Skills that will help maintain your Well-being at Work
Given below are some skills that one can practise and comply with for well-being at their workplace:
Active Learning with a Growth Mind-set
Just as an equanimous mindset helps us function in the world a growth mind-set helps us deal with workplace pressures and difficulties. Once an employee develops a personal skillset, they look at work tensions as challenges to overcome rather than obstacles.
Active learning at a workplace is vital to promote the overall development of an employee’s growth. Academic studies reveal that performance improves when there is a growth mindset.
Creating a Supportive Environment
To thrive at your workplace, it is important to create a supportive, cohesive and encouraging work environment. For a team to deliver the best outcomes, every employee must develop great interpersonal skills with their teammates.
According to TLNT, 80 percent of workers agree that having the opportunity to learn new skills at work makes them more interested and engaged in their job. At the end of the day, supporting and uplifting others can spurt your personal growth.
Creative and Critical Thinking
To just do what you’re told at work is not always the right approach. As an employee, it is a must to interrogate instructions and processes. Life is all about maintaining a healthy balance. Instead of taking the logical route, evaluate the information available. As much as a logical quotient is important, allowing your critical thinking ability and letting your creative juices flow can help you improve processes, innovate in your field and spot pain points.
Rethinking the Value of Soft Skills
Soft skills are a broad term that is an amalgamation of social skills, communication skills, people skills and personality traits. In today’s workplace, it’s all about ‘survival of the fittest’. Working on each of these skills will help you interact better with your colleagues and maintain an overall peppy vibe at your workplace.
If you thought a job is all about ‘all work and no play’, you’re mistaken. Although business at work is important, getting a good hold on your soft skills will help you get through complex tasks with ease.
Celebrate and Share your Successes
A common reason most employees leave their jobs is that they do not feel appreciated. Whether it’s your first day at work, or you’ve been around for a while, you’re not expected to be perfect. Instead, look at yourself as ‘work-in-progress.
Thus, even if you achieve a small milestone, learn to celebrate it. A “pat” of appreciation will push you to do better and motivate you. Since a simple reward is fulfilling, rewarding and motivating, celebrating and sharing your success with teammates will only electrify your performance and encourage further growth.
Conclusion
Today, increasing importance is being placed on soft-skills. If you are looking to establish workplace well-being, it is important to develop and practice good soft skills that will influence the way you work, your interpersonal relationships, and your overall success.
About the author
Ms Geeta Ramakrishnan, Author of Amazon’s bestseller book ‘The Game of Change’
Geeta Ramakrishnan is an ontological coach, who has authored Amazon’s #1 Bestseller book, ‘The Game of Change’. This book brings together her rich experience of having interacted and coached people over the past few decades. Her coaching focus has primarily been on change management and assisting people professionally and personally, to help bring to their lives a balance of success and happiness or in other words, help them discover their ‘AHA’ moment.
Growing up in Mumbai, Geeta completed her Bachelors’ in Chemistry and moved to Dubai after marriage where she got involved in the Human Capital Management of her family business. She was instrumental in building a successful HC system and currently overseas the daily activities and initiatives of the companies. However, like any other working woman, she experienced difficulties straddling both her family and career ambitions. This is when she decided to look at work-life balance with a different perspective and try out new things. Eventually, it helped changed her mind set from being stressed to a happy and confident woman.
Having worked closely with different kind of people, it helped refine her viewpoints regarding people and their habits. She is an ICF certified coach trained from Newfield Asia, Singapore. In context of a high pressure world, where one can get intimidated by the overpowering task of managing multiple roles, she helps enable people to realise their potential. She offers trainings and workshops on her favourite subject, ‘change’.
As a coach, Geeta has brought both her personal and years of work experience, along with sciencebased research and considers coaching an art of helping people cope with change. She refers to herself as a ‘change catalyst’. In her one-on-one coaching program she is able to connect well with people and assist them to identify and achieve what they desire. When working with organisations, she is ably to assist in retaining and keeping employees motivated to be better performers by helping them discover the power to introspect.
Being a woman, she is passionate to empower more women and has set a mission to reach 10,000 women to help them win the game of change by providing tools to lead stress-free and meaningful life. She realises growth opportunities among different kinds of women from C-suite professionals, start-up entrepreneurs and home-makers.
Geeta believes the more you give, the more you receive which helps her stay strong and grounded. She believes age is no bar to change and continues on a quest to constantly keep learning, improving and updating her skills. She finds her role, as a life coach, enormously satisfying. Apart from her work, she also makes time for reading philosophy and fiction and enjoys painting, knitting and crochet.
