Memory: A Necessary Soft Skill for a Busy Workplace

The workplace has fundamentally changed in the last decade. It is the expectation that employees at all levels multitask and do more than ever before. With greater responsibility and more tasks to carry out on a daily basis, employees need a greater range of soft skills to get by. Memory is one of those new soft skills for the daily routine. If your employees regularly forget steps in complex tasks, or simply forget to carry out a task altogether, perhaps they could benefit from Bookboon’s effective solution to boost memory?

We know that stress in the workplace can have knock-on effects. One of these effects is poor memory. There are things we can do about stress, and in some cases, heavy workload.

However, memory is not just a problem associated with stress. People with learning difficulties such as dyslexia also struggle with memory as a matter of routine. Employers can help everyone manage memory issues.

Why the soft skill “memory” is important in the workplace

Although stress can lead to short-term memory loss, it is not the only cause. It is well-known that multitasking (something required in the modern workplace) has a detrimental effect on the memory. As we get older, most of us experience natural memory loss. There is often nothing to worry about, but employees forgetting whole tasks or individual elements of a task can have repercussions for your business. It comes across as unprofessional when a supervisor, manager, customer or client is told that the employee simply forgot. Yet we all suffer from memory issues.

How we react is what is important; suddenly rushing a task because the employee forgot can exacerbate stress. It can also lead to mistakes.

Immediate memory-boosting tips:

There are some effective tips that you can implement now to help your employees boost their memory. We have covered some of these in the past, such as this list effective memory boosting tips.

The most obvious memory aids include:

• • Encourage your employees to use task lists. This can be keeping a notepad on their desk to update every day. Once into such a routine, it can be difficult to break.

• • Use “mnemonics”. This complex sounding word is actually simple. Mnemonics is the use of associations – acronyms or word sequences. For example, many children in the UK are taught “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain” to remember the colours and sequence of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet)

• • Using associations can be a great method for people with dyslexia or other processing disabilities to remember names, dates, times and other information. For example, using a Green sticky note to remember a meeting and that Mister Green is chairing the meeting
• Chunking is one of the oldest methods of remembering things. Long strings of numbers are more easily memorised when broken down into groups of two or three. This is why we separate each element in a date or break down phone numbers into blocks

Bookboon’s Solution to poor memory

While these tips are useful for most employees, you may wish to invest in more engaging and sustainable methods.

Bookboon has a large collection of eBooks for training in a wide variety of subjects. This also includes the soft skills important to the modern workplace.

Our cost-effective eLibrary Solution permits your employees to work on practical tasks in their own way, how they prefer to work, without feeling rushed. Ebooks are the modern way to engage your employees in business training and more effective, cheaper than conventional classroom training and on demand.

Test Bookboon ’s eLibrary with this free demo.