In the workplace, there’s a clear-cut difference between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skills. Hard skills are the technical, tangible ones: knowing a foreign language, graphic design, bookkeeping etc. Soft skills are abilities that combine interpersonal strengths, common sense, personality and people skills. Although harder to define, measure, quantify, and assess,…

‘The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. If you live to be 80, you’ll have had about 4,000 weeks. But that’s no reason for despair.’ So says Oliver Burkeman in his phenomenal book, Four Thousand Weeks – all about time management ‘for mortals’. Burkeman explains that it’s only…

How do you create impactful learning experiences for adults? For a learning designer embarking on the creation of any new training content, your aims are likely to be as follows: To create material that is genuinely helpful to learners To successfully share knowledge and/or skills…and… For the knowledge/skills to…

Where do your suppliers rank in your customer experience pecking order? Do they receive the same level of TLC as you shower upon those who purchase your products/services? Do you respond to their emails as promptly and politely as you would to an email sent to you by your…

We’ve now reached the end of our three-part series on communication strategies. You can view the previous two articles on communication roadblocks and active and reflective listening on our blog. Today, we’ll discuss healthy confrontation practices. And yes, you read that right – ‘healthy’ and ‘confrontation’ are two words…

Welcome back to our three-part series on communication. In our last blog post, we talked about how our poor conversational habits (e.g. judging, sending solutions and avoidance) can create communication ‘roadblocks’.  This time, we’ll discuss how you can improve communication by using active and reflective listening. Let’s dive into…

Did you know that communication barriers can harm your relationships with friends, family and work colleagues? Relationship building relies heavily on communication, so you risk missing out on some significant chances to connect if you’re unaware of the dynamics at play.  In fact, over 50 per cent of people…

How often have you stopped to consider equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in public transport? Did you know that in the 1960s people of colour weren’t allowed to drive buses? And as recently as the 1990s, buses and trains weren’t accessible to people with disabilities? In this article, we…

What are the skills and characteristics of a fantastic customer service employee? What does it take to survive and thrive in the role? It’s certainly not an easy gig – dealing with an increasingly demanding public, day in, day out. But it’s a role that’s valuable and highly rewarding…

If you’re looking to create a great experience for your customers, it’s well worth looking at the principles laid out in Matt Watkinson’s bestseller The Ten Principles Behind Geat Customer Experiences. Watkinson states that if you want to create a great customer experience, you need to: Reflect the customer’s…