Think about the last time you went into a store. Did an employee greet you? Was an employee responsive and available to answer your questions meaningfully if you need assistance? If your experience was overwhelmingly positive, you likely have soft or durable skills training to thank. Soft skills, like communication, problem-solving, and resourcefulness, are critical traits needed on the frontline. Despite their importance, it’s not often a set of skills included in formal training, as many companies expect employees to possess these skills in some capacity already. However, not every employee has the same life experiences or background that would lend itself to being a great problem-solver or a clear communicator, which is especially relevant for frontline workers who might just be coming out of school or who’ve been out of the workforce for a significant amount of time.
To keep the frontline experience seamless for customers and employees, soft skills training should start during the onboarding experience but must be implemented thoughtfully to be effective. Here are four tips to improve soft skills training for the frontline.
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Pick-and-Choose Based on Your Company’s Needs
To create an effective soft skills training program, determine the specific skills your employees need to do their jobs. For example, if you’re a fast-food chain, you want to ensure that your employees can work within a team dynamic to move food quickly down the line and can manage the lunchtime rush that comes with increased orders. With these expected behaviors in mind, you want to focus on improving skills related to stress management and fostering teamwork. By determining the most critical soft skills for success, you can focus most of your training program on these skills before expanding into a broader set of capabilities. This will set up your employees for immediate success, make them feel supported, and ensure they can do their jobs from day one.
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Make it Personal
Once you’ve determined the most critical skills for your business, you also need to personalize the training based on the specific needs of each employee. Not every person who works for the same company comes to the table with the same experiences or level of skills, so you need to create tailored programs to help fill in the gaps and provide the specific training each employee needs. By assessing the needs of each employee, you’ll speed up the training process and ensure that employees aren’t undergoing training that isn’t useful. Employees love personalization, so in addition to leading to better outcomes, this will help create happier employees.
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Long-Term Learning
Fully mastering soft skills takes time. Providing your employees with a baseline through instructor-led events, online courses, or digital training modules on their mobile phones or POS devices during the onboarding process will lead to a smoother start to their careers, but the training shouldn’t stop there. Employees must be allowed to continuously put these skills to the test and receive feedback on their performance. For example, as part of ongoing learning, a grocery worker may be asked to log in to a device-enabled training program and answer a few scenario-based questions at the beginning of their shift to see how they would use what they learned to solve real-world problems. By combining the data from these sessions with on-the-job observations, managers have a framework to help drive coaching sessions and learning paths.
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Practice What You Preach
Perhaps the most effective training tool is having managers demonstrate the desired skills and behaviors they expect of employees. Whether improving customer interactions or time management, modeling the behavior you expect from your employees is one of the best ways to teach soft skills. Seeing this behavior repeated in real-time reinforces their training and illustrates how time, experience, and confidence can turn them into top performers.
By equipping frontline workers with soft skills personalized to their needs, which ultimately serve the company’s KPIs, better business outcomes and higher employee retention will follow. Employees will be better prepared, more confident, and less stressed out, which means teams who perform their jobs more effectively. So, take the time to get the process right. A robust, modern training program that includes soft skills and starts during the onboarding process is key and will set up employees to succeed through every step of their careers.
