Learning is trending.

The way the world perceives upskilling has dramatically evolved in the last couple of years. Remember when the pandemic broke and a lot of very cool universities across the world announced free courses? Yes, our feeds were blown with certifications and people sharing testimonials on how they’ve been utilizing the lockdown to grow and develop their skills. Well, another thing that happened in the midst of that was that people began demanding learning opportunities from their employers. They were no longer able to attend in-person conferences, meetings, networking events and a lot of people felt that was dramatically stunting their growth. Thus, organizations began paying heed to this sudden demand for learning and allocating budgets and time to a segment that was much ignored for a long time — L&D.

In fact, LinkedIn recently released their 2022 Workplace Learning Report which reflected this through data.

These statistics essentially show that organizations are responding to the demands of today’s workforce which deeply values learning. They want an organization to invest in their growth and employers are fast realizing how significantly this factor is impacting hiring and retention. Another LinkedIn survey showed that 7 out of 10 Gen Z are more likely to join a company if they get ample learning opportunities.

So, we know that companies are on the right track. But are their L&D interventions?

More often than not, learning interventions are devised and delivered on the back of limited or no data. This also means that these interventions are extremely standardized and centralized without catering to specific employee needs. One of the most trending forms of upskilling implemented by organizations at the beginning of the pandemic was workshops conducted via webinars. Workshops on wide subjects that ‘might’ have been relevant to ‘most’ employees.

While this is a great step in the right direction, it’s not necessarily something that directly helps businesses because it is being executed blindly. What most companies fail to realize is that if you invest in learning the right way, by basing your interventions on reliable data, it can directly impact business outcomes. The Definitive Guide to Learning: Growth in the Flow of Work, a research study produced by The Josh Bersin Company shows that “effective L&D departments are no longer training functions — they’re growth functions”.

Making data-backed upskilling decisions means you’re not wasting money or time and directly contributing to your business. In fact, a lot of companies invest money in trying to map RoI on learning interventions, and oftentimes even cut L&D budgets due to poor impact metrics. This is largely due to the fact that most interventions are being implemented randomly.

Fundamento helps companies measure and develop teams in power skills and provides them with data-backed training recommendations.

Here are some best practices we think organizations should adopt:

Personalized learning

Carpet-bombing L&D initiatives has to stop. The current workforce is very enthusiastic about working in organizations that invest in their personal professional growth. This means understanding their needs and addressing them in a way that propels their career. So, while organizations put aside L&D budgets, it might be pertinent for them to note that using it without really understanding what each employee needs would not reap the results they’re looking for.

As mentioned above, the best way to do this is with data. Measuring teams on power skills can be extremely beneficial in charting out the right learning interventions for them.

Introduce a learning allowance

Millennials and Gen Z also want their own space and time to upskill and they are extremely vocal about it. Learning allowances are transformative because they allow an employee to chart out their own learning journey. This makes room for on-demand learning where employees can learn in the flow of work, at their own time and pace.

Learning in the flow of work

It’s important that whatever L&D route the organization takes, it seamlessly integrates with the employees’ work and is continuous. A lot of the upskilling initiated by organizations goes unattended because it requires employees to go above and beyond their existing work or is only a one-time activity. Thus, recommendations for training that are given to employees should essentially help them learn in the flow of work, making it more impactful.

There’s a lot more that organizations can do to build better teams and see improvement in business outcomes. We’ll be deconstructing these over the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, visit Fundamento if you’re looking to power up your organization today.

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“Seize the opportunity!”

“Push your boundaries!”

“Go the extra mile!”

If you’ve been brought up in an Asian household, achieving beyond what’s expected of you is probably something you’ve been brought up with. Spiritual gurus have been talking for a while about how looking beyond the obvious is the first step towards personal and professional growth. We hear this in every motivational, self-help talk out there. However, it is only now that this emotional intelligence trait has been realized as one of the most vital factors for organizational success — Initiative. It almost sounds elementary, but it’s not.

We’ve spent a lot of time deep-diving into why it’s super important to have emotionally intelligent teams. The idea of this blog is to really deconstruct what that means, and step one is to understand a crucial emotional intelligence trait — Initiative.

This is how we define Initiative at Fundamento:

Initiative is being able to proactively seize opportunities and achieve beyond what is required or expected.

How does this really play out?

According to HR Dive, one of the most prevalent organizational deficiencies today is accountability, which directly affects initiation behaviors of managers, leaders and employees. Today, top leaders have begun to understand what initiation behavior is and have been working towards effectively developing the trait not just themselves but also in their teams. There’s enough research out there that indicates how managers and HR professionals emphasize the need for proactiveness in team members and top management for the overall growth of an organization. Especially with startups, the key to scaling up an idea while working with a small team is the ability of the team to take ownership, accountability and be proactive.

With workplaces moving to virtual spaces and interactions becoming less physical post the global pandemic, Initiative plays a huge role.

What is an Initiative approach at the workplace?

Employees taking responsibility and ownership of everything they do is the first step towards taking Initiative. It entails delivering what was expected from them and delivering it with the best of their abilities. However, taking Initiative goes beyond just that. People who have a strong Initiative trait tend to also be termed as proactive and opportunistic.

This is primarily because Initiative means being proactive, recognizing new opportunities and seizing them on-the-go. You don’t wait for an SOP to tell you to do it and that is what sets you apart. It’s a trait that is highly valued and assures you a rewarding career as it ends up yielding unexpected results.

But why is Initiative so important?

A lot of people question this. Isn’t doing what is expected of you enough to succeed? We dug up some closely-related data to understand this better.

Research shows that employees and managers who are involved in goal setting are 3.6 times more likely to engage in the overall growth of an organization, but only 30% are actually involved.
A study by Gallup stated that only 21% of employees are motivated by incentives and pay, which were traditionally used to manage and increase productivity.

This research might seem disconnected from what we’re discussing but let’s zoom out and see the larger picture. Our workplaces are now dominated by Millennials and the Gen Z is just stepping in. This new segment of the workforce brings with them a new set of expectations including a larger purpose, personal growth and new opportunities that they can be a part of. In the midst of this changing workforce dynamic, employers are looking at ways to achieve multigenerational workplace stability while ensuring there is constant productivity at play. Initiative plays a very important role in establishing expectations and providing feedback. It has shown an increase in proactiveness and in turn the performance of the employees. Studies have revealed that employees who know what is expected of them and take Initiative are around 2.5 times more engaged and motivated to show more outstanding work.

Here are some advantages of having a team with strong Initiative:

Enhances the overall performance
Increased levels of participation in organizational growth
Employee performance development with a sense of increased competency
More creative and innovative solutions
Collaborative workplaces
Increased employee involvement in decision-making
Higher employee satisfaction

Workplace proactiveness can help your organization enhance your overall growth and help scale up businesses in the short and long-term.

Fundamento helps organizations measure and develop behavioral skills and emotional intelligence traits, such as Initiative, in their workforce.

Identify and Address Skill Gaps

The first step to devise an L&D strategy that works is to identify the skills employees require to perform optimally in their job roles and assess the current proficiency level of these skills. Once this is identified, L&D interventions can be tailored as per the analysis. Skillr’s assessments measure skills with focus area-level precision. These are skills that are required to excel at specific job roles such as inside sales, customer service and first-time managers. Once measured, the future-readiness matrix (shown below), provides a birds-eye view of your team’s overall health by identifying skills strengths, deficits, blind spots, and obstacles. Once these have been identified, it is much easier to address these gaps with the help of Skillr’s tailored recommendations on areas such as:

Talent Acquisition: Identify the skills to look out for in new hires so that they can hit the ground running and objectively raise the bar by filling in the skill deficits and blind spots.
Talent Development: Design training and learning interventions to ensure the employees develop the skills which are important but not reliable across the organization.

Create Individualized Development Plans

Skills assessment as a prerequisite to planning the L&D strategy allows organizations to understand each employees’ individual strengths and areas of development. Identifying low and top performers within the same team can help organisations close the performance gap between different employees and provide deeper insights on how to develop each employee in their own unique way.

Another excellent example of customised development pathways is Skillr’s People Potential Matrix (shown below), which compares actual performances with predicted potential to identify nuanced growth strategies for various categories of performers in the team, such as self-sufficient superstars to risky prospects who require training. For example: Low performers may require skills training or coaching to improve while high performers may need to be retained with development plans and reward and recognition practices.

Smart Succession Planning

Conventional succession planning relies on measures like tenure and functional performance to make promotion decisions which often lead to the wrong people being promoted as leaders. This can bring down the morale and productivity of the entire team. It is also important to remember that the skills required to perform a functional role differ from the skills required to excel as a leader. Using skills assessment for succession planning solves this issue and ensures the right people are promoted. With Skillr’s specialized leadership potential assessments, you can measure your employees on skills required to succeed in a leadership role. Furthermore, it helps you to identify talent with untapped leadership potential and people management skills, despite their tenure or past leadership experience. Investing in the development of such talent will not only engage and but also retain these emerging leaders of the organization.

Objectively measure the impact of L&D interventions

Although organizations spend a lot of money on their L&D programs, executive board members often complain about the lack of tools to objectively measure the return of investment (ROI) which is required to justify the costs and benefits to various stakeholders. Longitudinal skills assessment before and after learning interventions are implemented is one way to solve this problem of intangibility. Skillr’s assessments measure and quantify skills to provide real-time insights on individuals as well as teams. Using the results of these longitudinal assessments, business leaders can measure the effectiveness of their training interventions and take decisions about continuing, improvising, or discontinuing the implemented intervention in an objective, data-driven manner.

*Skillr’s Longitudnal Skills Assessment*

Simply put, skills assessments can propel organisations to strengthen their L&D strategy, which in turn provides a competitive edge that helps attract and retain talent, build an employer brand, develop and leverage people capabilities and consequently keep the workforce engaged, motivated, and retained for the long-term.

Strengthen your L&D strategy and get deep insights with Skillr’s Skill assessment. Book a free trial today .

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There’s been an evident shift in the world of work ever since the pandemic hit. With remote work and virtual communication becoming the new normal, organizations have been forced to reevaluate their approach to employee training, development, and support. Perhaps the most significant change has been the focus on employee experience and investment. Organizations have adjusted their approach to employee development during the pandemic and technology has played a huge role in employee care and productivity. However, navigating this shift hasn’t been easy.

The Ever-Evolving Employee Experience

There has been a significant shift in the way organizations approach people strategy. The focus now is more on the employee experience, and it goes beyond just basic training and ensuring that people do their technical work well. We recently spoke to Naveen Manshani, Director, Total Rewards at the UnitedHealth Group. He said, “What I have observed in the hospitality and retail sectors is that organizations give customers a particular type of experience through their employees who cater to them. The kind of experience that customers have with an organization is determined by the employees’ training and the experience that they themselves have within the organization.”

This makes a lot of sense because unless employees are equipped at work, they’re most likely to not deliver quality. If employees are not offered a good experience with their organization, they cannot give customers a fantastic experience. With the pandemic, organizations realized the need to invest in their people beyond what they’ve been doing. Many organizations went above and beyond to support their employees during the pandemic. Getting the care and support from their organization took employee commitment to the next level and unlocked productivity which organizations are now looking at holding onto and amplifying as they move forward.

Organizations that took the time to ensure that their employees were supported are the ones that thrived in the pandemic and will continue to in the future. Employees who experience support, recognition, respect, and pride from their organization can work with reassurance and dedication. In turn, their commitment and positivity can lead to increased productivity and a better work culture. Organizations have a responsibility to invest in their people as they are the key to an organization’s success.

A Shift in Employee Training and Development

Organizations have over the last few years been forced to adapt to new ways of conducting business, and this shift has also affected employee training and development. Many companies have moved their training programs from in-person to online, creating a virtual environment for their employees to learn and grow. This has allowed employees to continue to receive necessary training while also being flexible with hybrid working.

In addition to training, companies have also had to shift the way they support their employees. Managers have had to learn how to support their employees virtually, and companies have had to provide virtual healthcare and onboarding experiences. The investments made by companies have had a positive impact on employee engagement and overall commitment to the organization. This investment is important, especially for a new generation of employees who joined the workforce virtually and are looking to be invested in by their employers.

In his conversation with us, Naveen laid down a few way in which companies can invest in the growth of their employees.

Individualized Approaches to Employee Development: Different organizations use different approaches to develop their employees. Some offer reimbursement for training expenses, while others develop a program to measure the initiatives’ impact on employees. The key is creating a program that meets the individual needs of employees. Understanding what employees want can help design a framework that allows individuals to choose what they want and meet their individual needs. The design of such a program is crucial for its success.
Equipping Teams for the Future of Work: While approaches to employee development will vary across industries and companies, one common thread is investing in people’s development to equip them for the future. With technology, the employee development experience will change further. The use of technology to develop people will evolve to use virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and simulated environments to help employees learn and develop skills to perform their responsibilities better. Organizations will work towards developing power skills using these emerging technologies is the next frontier in employee development.

Impact of People Initiatives on Business Metrics

Investing in employees’ wellbeing and growth not only positively impacts employee engagement but also has a positive impact on business metrics. While some organizations saw adverse impacts on their bottom line with remote working, those who invested in their employees have reaped benefits. “For example, organizations in the automobile and hospitality industries, who invested in their employees during the pandemic, have seen a pent up demand for their products and services. This has allowed them to recover and compensate for the impact of the pandemic on their business,” added Naveen.

Investing in employees has driven employee commitment and engagement, resulting in a positive impact on business metrics. Companies have seen their employees become more committed to serving customers and supporting the organization’s goals. This commitment has had a direct positive impact on the bottom line of the organization. Most organizations today have realized that this investment is critical for the long-term success of the organization.

The Role of Technology in Employee Growth and Productivity

Technology has played a huge role in enabling faster connections and collaborations. The pandemic has caused a sudden thrust in the way people collaborate using technology and this has been a game-changer in the workplace. Technology is being used in a variety of ways to make faster connections and collaborate in a more efficient manner than ever before. The ability to use technology to continue to deliver on expectations is something that will continue to evolve.

Beyond compensation, if every organization wants to compensate their employees competitively, it’s the fact that they care about the growth of employees that can instill a feeling of belonging and appreciation in them. Creating a variety of programs and initiatives to personalize the experience is important. Standardizing offerings to meet employee needs may have some takers, but creating a framework in such a manner that allows for customization will cater to their individualization needs. With enough opportunities in the market, collaborating with different service providers to create solutions can meet employees’ individual needs. Although it’s a journey that will take some time, personalizing the employee experience is the way to go.

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Slack, Trello, and Google Workspaces are collaborative tools that are all the hype in workplaces these days. Why?

Productivity tools are taking advantage of a skill that workplaces are now valuing immensely — deep collaboration. There is a transformative shift where companies are looking for people who can work together to produce groundbreaking results. Work is no longer just about meeting deadlines and targets while working solo, it’s about people who can facilitate collaborativeness. In order to get to the next level, team members need to pool in their resources while complementing each other’s skillsets.

But what is deep collaboration?

“It is the ability to collaborate or operate in cross-functional capacities for a shared purpose. It involves acknowledging interdependence, transparency, cultural diversity, and individual or team contributions to help accomplish organizational goals.”

This sounds simple enough, and it is! Collaborative workspaces are not an alien concept in modern day work life. At its core, being able to work together on a solution with the resources available is what collaboration is all about.

What are some ways you can promote collaboration in your company?

First thing’s first, you would want to assess your team to see what level of deep collaboration sense they already have.
Cultivate collaboration as a value and encourage open communication. Having a conversation about collaboration as a fundamental company value will reinstate the importance of working together, as opposed to working competitively in teams.
Provide collaboration tools and establish rules around how and when to use them. Emails, calls, messaging are all tools to enable collaborative work, however, some ground rules need to be set in order to ensure effective flow of communication.
Set goals together. Teams working on specific tasks must brainstorm and set goals together to get everyone on the same page. It creates a sense of collective goal achievement which can accelerate the pace of work.
Build trust between team members. Team building activities outside of just work can help in building trust.

At Fundamento, we measure and develop behavioural skills such as deep collaboration, critical thinking, curiosity, communication, among others. Book a demo with us here.

Working collaboratively has some direct benefits — stronger teams, more innovation, knowledge sharing among team members and finally more efficiency during projects. As a result of working closely together, team members also develop a trust, empathy, positivity, accountability and ownership, all skills which are essential for the future of work.

When most employees are asked what makes them stand out at their job as compared to their colleagues, they normally say things like being qualified, delivering excellent results, being skilled, and so on. However, they rarely mention their ability to learn more on the job, their curiosity and willingness to learn. That is a quality that many underestimate and undervalue.

Curiosity, according to experts, is essential for employee growth and achievement. Curiosity, or the desire to learn new things and explore new possibilities, plays a vital role in people’s lives. Curiosity is far more vital to a company’s success than previously imagined and recent research published in the Harvard Business Review substantiates that. It highlights 3 key findings about how curiosity in the workplace leads to higher-performing teams:

Employees and their leaders can respond to market realities and challenges by cultivating curiosity.
Curiosity allows them to make creative decisions by thinking creatively and rationally about things.
Curiosity also aids in the development of a more trusting and collaborative relationship between leaders and their staff.

Simple modifications are all that is required for leaders to stimulate their employees’ interest, but many leaders suppress curiosity out of concern of increasing risk and inefficiency. This concern was addressed by Peter Kimbowa, a business consultant at IFE Consultancy, when he addressed accountants about the importance of curiosity in the workplace at the 24th Annual Institute of Certified Public Accountants Uganda (ICPAU) conference at Imperial Royale Beach Hotel recently. He stated:

“Curiosity improves engagement and collaboration. Curious people make better choices, improve their company’s performance, and help their company adapt to uncertain market conditions and external pressures.”

By making tiny adjustments to their organization’s design and how they manage their personnel, leaders can inspire curiosity in themselves and others.

According to a report released by the World Economic Forum in 2018, curiosity is among the many skills along with creativity, originality, and initiative, critical thinking, analysis, complex problem-solving, leadership, and social impact that will be essential for the future of work in 2022 and beyond.

But, how does curiosity benefit you in the workplace?

Curiosity actively cuts down the scope for errors while making decisions. This is largely because you’re less likely to fall prey to confirmation bias and/or form judgements.
It leads to enhanced creativity and innovation. Curiosity is linked to fewer protective stress reactions and fewer aggressive responses to provocation.
Leads to team-building and eliminates conflict as the team takes keen interest in other people’s thoughts than in their own.
Teams communicate better, hence perform better as they are more open to sharing information and listen more intently.

Today’s successful leaders need to be able to work effectively with people across cross-functional teams that are vastly diverse. Thus, the need for them to be people-centric has drastically increased. Especially over the last two years, with the pandemic mainstreaming remote working amidst crisis, it has become vital for businesses to attract and train talent that can guide their organizations through both good and bad times. This necessitates going beyond typical management development tactics and competencies and building the most crucial skills and traits for success.

One of them, somewhat unexpectedly, is empathy.

What is empathy?

Empathy is the ability to understand and relate to another person’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences. Empathetic people are good at seeing things from another person’s point of view and reacting compassionately.

Empathy in the workplace simply means that your employees are able to build genuine, empathetic bonds with one another, which improves relationships and productivity.

It’s crucial to distinguish between compassion and empathy, as the two are frequently confused.

Sympathy is characterized by sentiments of pity for another person, yet without fully comprehending what it feels like to be in their shoes.
Empathy is the aptitude or skill to imagine oneself in another’s situation, experiencing that person’s emotions, ideas, or perspectives.

Empathy entails being able to recognise and understand others’ needs, as well as their feelings and thoughts. Unfortunately, it’s long been disregarded as “just another soft skill” rather than a powerful emotional intelligence trait that’s proven to be a fantastic performance indicator. There is enough research to back this.

Why is empathy important in the workplace?

According to the Centre for Creative Leadership’s research, today’s successful leaders must be more “person-focused” and able to collaborate effectively with people from various teams, departments, nations, cultures, and backgrounds. Their white paper stated that empathy in the workplace is positively related to job performance. The post-pandemic world has reinforced this claim as productivity and empathy saw a direct correlation over the last two years. This was unexpected for many, but not surprising. The pandemic only accelerated the need for something that is actually fundamental to building a future-ready team.

In other words, bosses regard managers who exercise empathetic leadership toward direct reportees as higher-performing employees. This is true, whether people believe it or not. Managers who were assessed as empathic by their subordinates were likewise recognised as excellent performers by their bosses. It is safe to say that empathy increases work productivity and overall job satisfaction by developing leadership, strengthening relationships, and fostering work productivity.

In fact, statistics show that empathy became an integral part of the workplace right before the pandemic, but the spillover is visible only now. The 2019 Workplace Empathy Study showed that 90% of employees believed empathy is vital in the workplace, and eight out of ten employees were likely to leave an employer who wasn’t empathetic.

The realization thus amongst most employers is that compassion and the ability to connect with others are essential skills in both our personal and professional life. Empathy in the workplace, which is a crucial component of emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness, improves human connections in general and can lead to more effective communication and beneficial outcomes in both the workplace and at home.

Here are some advantages of being empathic at work:

It facilitates communication.
It helps to improve professional relationships.
It helps you think more creatively.
It enhances the number of sales and investment options available.
It helps to improve customer service.
It has an impact on employment interviews.
It boosts productivity.
It improves cultural competence.

But what changed with the pandemic?

COVID-19 came as a test in time. Businesses lost and are losing talent in droves. Many of us are emotionally and physically exhausted, facing burnout, which the WHO went on to define as “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”. Individuals, not organizations or cultures, are now thought to be the source of burnout. “The responsibility for managing it [burnout] has shifted away from the individual and towards the organization”, said an article in the Harvard Business Review. It is now the responsibility of the corporation to help their employees.

The blurring of home and work life has been one of the major difficulties, leading to a rise in loneliness and social isolation. This lack of limits, combined with rising financial strain and concerns about job security, has resulted in a drop in mental health and an increase in anxiety. As Microsoft’s Satya Nadella said, “Work from home feels like sleeping at work.”

In a global survey conducted by Qualtrics, two-in-five respondents (41.6%) claimed their mental health had deteriorated since the onset of COVID-19, while 57.2 percent indicated increased worry. Empathy can be quite helpful in dealing with these problems. It fosters a sense of belonging by reaffirming that employees’ opinions count and that their voices are heard.

How does this play out IRL?

Empathy allows you to better relate to your coworkers and clients. Knowing how to be empathetic can help you enhance communication and build great relationships at work, resulting in a more positive work environment. Employers are now focussing on measuring and developing prospective, as well as current employees to ensure they not only understand empathy but actively practice it.

Fundamento helps organizations do this in a big way. Our intelligent platform helps them get objective data on employee performance specifically with regards to how empathetic they are. This is done through interactive quizzes that allow us to extract predictive data which can precisely map an employee’s overall performance in a certain role.

Each person is distinct in terms of their values, cultural understandings, backgrounds, and perspectives. When working on these types of teams, you may use your capacity to empathize and understand others to good use. Measuring skills and traits is important to develop enduring teams that are ready for the future. Empathy is only one of those traits, but a crucial one.

Written by Aryaman Kakkar

Visit fundamento.ai to know more

It’s been over a year since Megha and I set out to build Skillr, as an extension of our learnings from Leap Skills. Our vision has been grounded in truly building a bias-free, skills-first world by reverse engineering the hiring problem from an employer’s perspective and understanding what they need. We’ve put employers at the center and have been helping them build great teams by leveraging decades of research in IO psychology and ethical, predictive AI to provide them with objective, actionable data on behavioral skills.

We’ve spent the last few months working with several rapidly growing organizations to navigate their recruiting journeys, identifying talent that is ready for the future of work, while extensively building upon our skills framework. Our intelligent hiring platform has been used by these companies comprehensively to collaborate, filter, assess, track and engage with candidates, while providing candidates an opportunity to be part of an equitable and transparent hiring process. We’ve learnt tremendously through this process with our early customers over the last year. Every conversation, interaction, suggestion, feedback has led us to gain deeper insight on what we’re building.

We’ve noticed a shift in organizational focus and priorities. We often found ourselves in the middle of discussions significantly centered around organizational design and its visible pivot towards endurance over efficiency. The way companies are being built today is changing rapidly.

Building enduring organizations is more important now than ever.

The pandemic has dramatically influenced this shift. It’s accelerated the shift to the gig economy and technology has come into our day-to-day in a huge way, sooner than we’d anticipated.

Organizations are now looking at building granularly skilled, resilient teams vs singularly competent ones. In fact, investing in talent to build better, more productive organizations is now considered commonplace. The difference however, is that companies are not just doing that. They are actively revisiting the drawing board to see what they need to do to build organizations that don’t just adjust to a constantly changing work environment but thrive in it.

Continuous research on skill gaps in companies has reemphasized that while business leaders think it is vital to have digital skills in the new world, future-ready, behavioral skills are becoming increasingly important. Yes, the future is digital and a lot of skills that are in demand today revolve around building core technical capabilities. However, the largest skill gaps that companies have been facing, especially in the last couple of years, are behavioral skills. This is no longer a hidden fact. In fact, IBM conducted a detailed study recently on closing the enterprise skill gap and concluded that the recently accelerated digital era has pushed the need for reformed business models, dynamic working mechanisms and a “flexible culture that fosters the development of critical new skills.”

This is important.

Technical skills are objective, and organizations are objectively able to hire people with measurably better technical skills. Even as technology changes, making ‘build vs buy’ decisions are relatively straightforward. However, behavioral skills are complex and require deep understanding and a lot of effort to measure and develop in teams. They’re also extremely cross-functional skills. Uniquely, human skills like critical thinking, bias to action, learning agility and even effective communication are now required across roles. This puts individuals in a position to move beyond narrow job responsibilities and build meaningful careers.

It is interesting to note that the importance of behavioral skills is more accepted in roles that involve working with people — be it customers, vendors or team members. However, every role today requires these skills, and that understanding is crucial. Even engineers and data scientists are now commonly expected to break down problems and liaise with multiple stakeholders to stay ahead of the curve. It is these 21st century skills that help them power through. As individuals with technical roles grow in their careers, it is their ability to work with, influence and develop other people that puts them onto an accelerated career path.

This is not only imperative for companies, but also fundamental from an individual’s standpoint. Studies have suggested repeatedly that over the next few years some job roles would either not exist or be automated. As AI and the future of work impact the nature of jobs, it is these skills that machines cannot replace which will unlock long-term opportunities.

For years companies have tried to find out what separates an outstanding leader from a good leader, a disruptive engineer from a smart engineer, a record-breaking salesperson from a salesperson who meets the quota or even an excellent young professional from an average college graduate. Research has shown that the answer in most cases is behavioral skills.

This is without doubt a two-way street.

While companies put more relevance on behavioral skills, it’s important that individuals focus on developing these skills alongside technical skill advancement. Fascinatingly, behavioral skills are highly transferable and easy to develop. For individuals who are looking to propel their careers forward, developing these future-ready skills can take them a long way. How people work with people and how they work on themselves is extremely relevant today. It is the core difference between being good at your job and being great at it.

Skillr was started by a team that spent almost 10 years decoding and imparting critical behavioral skills to over 200k young professionals. It is because of this experience that we see ourselves playing a critical role in the narrative of behavioral skills at the workplace.

Moving forward, we are going to be playing a more active role with our clients and their stakeholders in building organizations for the future of work. Over the last year we’ve been able to completely demystify the science behind these skills and make measuring these intangible skills possible for every organization. We are now going a step further.

Our next step is to complement our actionable data with an upskilling action plan. We believe it is not only important for organizations to address the skill gaps identified in their teams, but also effectively train them to build future-ready behavioral skills. This is a move that is deeply aligned with our vision and will focus on arming both organizations and individuals with necessary skills at the workplace.

Finally, measuring and developing behavioral skills is going to be fundamental for building teams equipped for the future of work. As a team we decided that our lofty vision needs a brand and a new personality that represents what we stand for. Thus, we are excited to announce that as we broaden our outlook and harness the true power of behavioral skills, Skillr will now be known as Fundamento.

The future of work is here, and so are we.

www.fundamento.ai

Are you facing trouble building great teams at work?

A great team translates directly into great output, but building that team doesn’t come easy. In a world that values empathy, sensitivity, and inclusivity, the last few years have seen radical changes when it comes to hiring new employees. In traditional business practices, organizations would hire based on an applicant’s resume, academic credentials, letters of recommendation, and other objective criteria. While these factors do help determine the credibility and suitability of an applicant for a role, it is difficult to determine who would be a good fit with the existing team, and promote a healthy work culture.

This is exactly where most organizations feel stuck.

However, what they are now recognizing is the value of emotional intelligence while hiring. You’d find multiple definitions of EI on the internet but this one fits in well.

Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to identify, understand, and control one’s own emotions, as well as the ability to comprehend and influence the emotions of others.

It entails being aware that emotions drive behaviors and have a positive or bad impact on individuals. Let’s break this down a little more.

When stuck in a high-pressure situation, or dealing with a tough situation at work, these traits matter. You can handle interpersonal relationships empathetically, for instance, if you are emotionally intelligent. Thus, having high emotional intelligence can subsequently help you achieve professional goals.

But should emotional intelligence be a factor while hiring? YES!

According to research published in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, a strong foundation in emotional intelligence improves one’s ability to make sound decisions, build and sustain collaborative relationships, deal effectively with stress, and cope to a greater degree with constant change [1].

To simply put it, emotional intelligence helps a person to not just excel at work, but also to achieve a variety of other aims and ambitions in life. It entails understanding different parts of your feelings and emotions, as well as devoting time to developing self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.

There are different ways this plays out at work. Workers with higher EQ than their colleagues are said to:

Make better decisions
Keep their cool under pressure and stress
Skillfully settle disagreements
Respond favorably to constructive feedback
Collaborate well
Demonstrate leadership characteristics
Have a higher degree of self-awareness

Furthermore, those with high EQ are more likely to succeed and thrive within organizations. A survey conducted by TalentSmart, showed that 90% of top performers were high in emotional intelligence, with a higher average income per year. This can not be a coincidence. The survey went on to further indicate that emotional intelligence also accounted for up to 60% of job performance for supervisors through CEOs.

While this clearly shows that people with high EQ tend to perform better, the term “Emotional Intelligence” can seem vast and daunting. EI can come to mean different things for different workplaces, which may lead you to ask: “What are the right EQ traits for me?”

What you need are traits that are pertinent to emotional intelligence in the universal workplace, while having the individual freedom to develop traits that you personally feel the need to work on.

To help you navigate the world of EI at the workplace, we, at Skillr, have identified 17 emotional intelligence traits that are crucial at work:

Emotional Self Awareness
Accurate Self Assessment
Self confidence
Empathy
Organizational Awareness
Emotional Self-control
Transparency
Adaptability
Achievement
Initiative
Optimism / Positive Outlook
Developing Others / Coach & Mentor
Inspirational Leadership
Change Catalyst
Influence (Persuasion)
Conflict Management
Teamwork and Collaboration

This exhaustive selection of emotional intelligence traits along with our behavioral skills, form the foundation of our organizational framework Skill Flex® that powers Skillr to unlock actionable data on skills and build future-ready teams.

Organizations are using Skill Flex® to hire fast and right

In a world with rapidly-changing work environments, it is these skills and traits that will set individuals up for success. Companies are today looking at investing in people and empowering their workforce. Skill Flex makes this easier by using ethical AI and this skills framework to provide an objective hiring solution.

Written by Aryaman Kakkar

To know more about how emotional intelligence traits are relevant to the future of work, visit skillr.ai

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Most companies today struggle with hiring. Teams are understaffed, roles aren’t getting filled on time, and sometimes not at all. There are a lot of interconnected elements at play — increasing attrition, evolving work dynamics, job uncertainty and a constantly changing business landscape, that has catapulted this problem even further. Moreover, the world of business is undergoing rapid changes with the advent of technology, automation, and evolving work models.

There’s also been a drastic shift in functional roles at the workplace. McKinsey’s 2021 insights on the future of work suggest that the world of work is changing so quickly that while some jobs will be lost, and many created, almost all jobs will change in the coming months and years.

Amidst this rapid shift, employers often find themselves stuck in a situation where they need to hire fast, but that doesn’t always translate into hiring right. They compromise quality which eventually contributes to the already existing attrition because retention becomes a major issue. It’s an ongoing cycle. The problem here that most of these companies face is that they have no objective data to rely on while predicting job performance. The recruitment process is time-consuming, subjective and largely driven by gut feelings.

This is where behavioral skills come in!

Behavioral skills essentially reflect performance and attitude. These skills are considered extremely valuable in the digital era, and rightly so. They’re highly transferable, learnable, help navigate changing work dynamics and predict job potential. Let’s break it down for you further to help you understand.

Over the years, industry experts, academicians and employers across the world have identified some essential behavioral skills that are important for employability and the future of work — effective communication, teamwork, motivation, problem-solving, enthusiasm, accountability and trust, among several others. These skills also form an important part of the competency frameworks of many organisations and are vital in defining success at work.

That’s not all. Increasingly, companies identify these skills as critical to business growth. The 2022 LinkedIn Global Talent Trend Report talks about “flex culture” replacing the old way of working. It suggests that companies are fast moving into adapting changeable and dynamic environments that allow flexible work structures to be implemented. Now more than ever, behavioral skills hold key relevance as they’ll be fundamental to this change.

But, how do you accurately assess these skills?

Adding behavioral science to the recruitment process helps organisations expand their talent pool, get a holistic view of candidate potential and accurately predict job performance. But, how do they do that? Recent research states that 80% companies are finding it difficult to source candidates with good behavioral skills in the labour market and 70% of employers who are actively hiring report a skills shortage. Skillr’s intelligent hiring platform does just that by helping organizations power up their hiring strategy with Skill Flex® and unlock actionable data on behavioral skills to build future-ready teams with speed and precision.

Read more about Skill Flex®!

Hiring fast and hiring right

We’ve leveraged decades of research in I/O psychology to build a platform that provides objective data to accurately predict job performance. Our behavioral assessments have been developed and designed specially to test for behavioural skills at the time of hiring. Moreover, Skillr is the first intelligent hiring platform with Skill Flex® which is based on the evidence that behavioral skills will become increasingly important in the future and are the best way to ensure workplaces are future ready.

At Skillr, we’ve identified 15 behavioral skills that we believe matter at the workplace:

Bias to Action
Result Orientation
Resilience
Professional Reliability
Deep Collaboration
Critical Thinking
Conflict Resolution
Influencing People
Creativity
Decision Making
Systems Thinking
Effective Communication
Curiosity
Learning Agility
Ability to Lead

Objective data on these skills helps companies hire the right talent at speed and with accuracy. The skills assessments on our platform help make accurate hiring, promotion and training decisions. In fact, behavioral skills can be developed over time through training, experiences and commitment to intentional practice. Thus, these assessments are critical because they help organisations discover high potential talent and identify skill gaps in the organisation to make informed and evidence-based decisions.

Written by Debjani Chatterjee

Want to know more about Skillr? Head to our website and book a demo!