Over the past few years, the Indian economy has been through a lot of ups and downs. In such tumultuous times, assessing the soft skills in employees is imperative. Just being experts in a particular technology is not enough. Skills like public speaking, presentation capability, ability to un-learn and re-learn are the asks of business.
It indeed is difficult to assess such qualities, as also unfortunately the professional courses of our education institutes do not pay much emphasis on this.
At Advaiya, our focus has always been on the capability of an employee to thrive on chaos and be adaptable to change- two major soft aspects of human attitude to help an individual sustain in any economy. Keeping this in mind, we use various methods to assess the soft skills of our employees. We have in place 360° performance assessment through which continuous and timely feedback is given to the employees. The employees also set their quarterly and annual agenda to include personal attributes they wish to hone.
We have Building Presence Voicing Thoughts sessions every week which are followed by informal surveys where the presenter is evaluated by peers on aspects of communication, presentation skills, and ability to keep the audience engaged.
“Gamification” is one of the most important method to assess the soft attributes. This gives the employees an opportunity to sell their ideas, negotiate with peers and encourages healthy and positive mutual competition. Gamification also helps in recognizing the idea or employee- which is a great morale booster. The most popular idea gets voted and thus encourages even the public shy employees to speak out their minds. We also have forums where people participate in activities like ethical hacking and developing apps in twelve hours. Such activities help people to think on their toes and think out of the box.
