Soft Skills Workshops with External Trainers: Getting Them Right

Abstract

Soft skills development workshops can serve multinational organizations towards the improvement of internal communication between employees of various language backgrounds attempting to collaborate on tasks and issues in performing their daily activities. Employer and management expectations of these workshops may not be consistent with those of employees and this gap can lead to employee pushback and even refusal to internalise and utilise the envisioned workshop key learning points that management wants them to develop. On the bases of years of professional experience as co-trainers holding soft skills development workshops and receiving employer and employee feedback on their work at dozens of multinational companies in Europe, the authors discuss critical milestones which must be met by management, in order to lay the groundwork for more successful soft skills workshops at their organisations.

Keywords

• employee development
• soft skills
• management
• workshop development
• employee motivation