The Soft Skill Perceptiveness Breeds Understanding Breeds Teamwork

Do your employees lack perceptiveness in understanding meaning? Misinterpreting what people say and how they say things can lead to a bad atmosphere. This situation is not good for effective teamwork and can negatively affect morale, job satisfaction, and performance. Perceptiveness is being lost as a core soft skill, but Bookboon has a solution available today. 

How we communicate with others has three basic elements. These apply whether we mean socially and in the workplace. Our delivery may differ, but it is always about:

• Language – what we say
• Tone – how we say the words
• Body language – how we present ourselves

All three come together as our personal communication. However, there is another important aspect here – how others perceive words, tone and body language.

Perceptiveness as a soft skill?

According to some researchers, communication is 7% words, 38% tone and 55% body language. If true, then the key to effective communication is not about listening to words, but the perception of the whole. intuition, perceptiveness, emotional intelligence – it grows and can be developed and fine-tuned. Therefore, it is a soft skill and necessary for the workplace. We tend to think of soft skills as how we act toward others. We don’t typically think of it in terms of how we respond to how others communicate. Arguably, emotional regulation falls into this category too.

There is a saying that goes “we can’t control how other people act, but we can control how we react”. This reaction dictates our emotional intelligence. Therefore, it is not difficult to see why perceptiveness and emotional intelligence is vital in the modern workplace. We spend so much time with the same people, so it’s important to understand each other.

The importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace

The benefits of perceptiveness in the workplace have been extensively documented. Today, some forward-thinking businesses include Emotional Intelligence tests and scenarios in interviews. Getting the right candidate is no longer simply about the right experience, education and background. Increasingly, it is about how an employee will cope in certain emotional scenarios.

Talking is just half of effective communication, but we need to listen more than we talk. Perhaps driven by the online world, it has become clear that too many of us talk, but don’t listen.

• Listening and perceptiveness forges better team bonding at all levels
• Good perceptiveness leads to good decision making, good communication and work efficiency
• In turn, these qualities lead to a happy and satisfied workforce

Perceptiveness is vital for your customer interactions too.

• Perceptive employees are able to react and respond to customer complaints accordingly
• Customers will perceive that the employee with strong perceptiveness skills is concerned about their situation, wants to help (empathy and interpersonal skills), and is professional
• Furthermore, it displays – to customers and those around them, that the employee has leadership qualities
• A customer who comes away with a positive vibe is more likely to return to your company in future. They are also more likely to ask for the same person on their return, building rapport

Bookboon’s eLibrary Solution

So what is the solution to perceptiveness, empathy and emotional intelligence? Simply, it is an eLearning Solution: Our wide range of eBooks cover a multitude of subjects. Those highly attractive soft skills that so many managers feel are missing from their employees, can be a thing of the past. With Bookboon’s eLibrary, employees can study at their own pace and in their own way to educate themselves, improve and learn new soft skills. Research has demonstrated repeatedly that when permitted to work at their own pace, employees learn quicker. They also take more pleasure from their learning.

Test Bookboon’s eLibrary with this free demo.