With the workplace evolving so quickly, it’s become more important than ever for professionals to keep their finger on the digital pulse and ensure that they stay equipped with technological skills. In turn, as technology becomes integrated into more and more facets of our daily working lives, there are two other qualities alongside tech-savviness that can place you head and shoulders above the crowds as a modern employee. These two qualities are resourcefulness and adaptability.
In other words, future-thinking professionals don’t just stop at building proficiency with digital technologies. They also actively engage with new tools and even new ways of using tools. They engage with new capabilities for tools as they’re made available, and maintain a proactive approach to utilising those tools in their own workplace.
A great example: have you ever used Adobe Acrobat to reduce PDF sizes? Well did you know that Acrobat can compress PDFs or merge PDF files to create multi-page files? You can even use it to add in e-signatures or make written notes in PDF files. As technology develops, so too do our capabilities. Great employees know this and operate with the intent of innovating and exploring.
But enough big picture stuff – let’s get into how you can become this employee. Here are 6 crucial skills you can use in any workplace to improve your value as an employee and perhaps even futureproof your CV.
1. Emotional Intelligence
Being emotionally intelligent means being able to pick up on other’s emotional states, and tuning into them to communicate better. It’s a skill that’s not taught in school, and yet is used everyday, in all settings. To work on it, Harvard University suggests starting with three things.
1, Recognise your own emotions and name them.
2. Ask for emotional quotient feedback from the people you know.
- Read literature with complex characters.
Then, you can understand your own emotions and how they affect others, as well as build empathy for people who think differently from you. Take your time working on this, and recognise that emotional intelligence is a skill to keep developing across your lifetime. Over time, you’ll see the benefits in your relationships and become a more respected coworker.
2. Understand Cultural Differences
Relating to emotional intelligence and empathy is understanding how people from other cultures react and behave. This is important when you’re working in multicultural groups, talking to overseas clients, or selling to different demographics – which in this globalised world, is almost a guarantee.
To improve your cultural awareness, immerse yourself in foreign cultures. It could be something as major as taking a trip to Madagascar, or as simple as sitting down with a coworker for a coffee and a chat. Movies, books, local festivals, related hobbies, and language learning all give different insights into a culture too.
3. Communication Skills
Being able to express yourself and convey your reasoning to different colleagues allows you to be versatile in the workplace. It also prevents issues arising from potential miscommunication. But improving your communication skills is not as simple as preparing your words beforehand or reading a dictionary.
It ties in with emotional intelligence, in that you need to recognise how to keep someone’s attention, which words they respond better to, and realising when you need to change tact. So to ensure you flourish at work and in successful job applications in the future, listen more, be mindful of your tone, and simplify your message by using more meaningful words.
Remember the importance of non-verbal communication too: your body language will give off important clues to whoever you’re talking to about your level of engagement and understanding.
4. Flexibility
With the fast moving tech of today, being able to drop what you’re doing and pivot to a new strategy is invaluable. Tunnel vision can quickly destroy competitive advantages, reduce efficiency, and cut down on opportunities.
To improve your flexibility, remain attentive to others’ suggestions, keep an optimistic attitude when receiving criticism, and readily adopt new skills. This way, when something doesn’t go to plan, you have the ideas, opportunities, and positive mindset to switch to a more effective strategy.
5. Continuous Development Mindset
A growth mindset is the prevailing factor to many people’s success today. This helps you maintain motivation and progress even when things don’t go to plan – view failure as practice for success. The opposite of this is a goal-oriented mindset, which prefers to focus on achieving quantified successes, instead of reinforcing strong habits and healthy attitudes.
With a growth mindset you can easily adopt new skills and ideas as the workplace demands it, and follow the flow of changing times more easily.
6. Improve Your Teamwork
People are stronger together, so making teamwork an enjoyable experience will allow you to flourish in the workplace. Understand your colleagues’ motivations, support them, and make communication easy and enjoyable. Sometimes this requires making one-on-one time for a chat so you can better align with a team member, and other times it’s doing acts of service to make your team feel valued.
Pay attention and recognise what your team responds to best, on both a group and an individual level.
Conclusion
The general theme of these 6 crucial skills centre around working on yourself, and how you interact with the people around you at work. A company is a machine built of people, and by working better with those people, you can grease those wheels and create new opportunities for yourself.
Adopt a growth mindset, and start paying closer attention to the people around you. See how you can help them, and they’ll help you. That will in turn make you an all-round better employee, as well as a better person.
