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…
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…
What does it take to not just survive but truly thrive in a frontline customer service role? Working in customer service is no walk in the park. It involves managing increasingly high expectations and handling difficult customers daily. However, when you have the right mindset and skills, this role…
If you want to change your life, start by changing your behaviour. If you want to transform your organisation’s culture, focus on changing your employees’ behaviour. So how do you create the right conditions for the right behaviours to take root—and stick? In last month’s blog, we explored why…
We’re all trying to change behaviour. Whether it’s sticking to a New Year’s resolution or encouraging employees to adopt the right behaviours at work, the challenge remains the same: how do we make change stick? James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, reminds us that meaningful behaviour change starts with…
In our last two blog posts, we explored the powerful role that habits play in shaping our behaviour and influencing organisational culture. We unpacked why we’re such creatures of habit and highlighted how these automatic behaviours can define the emotional climate of a workplace. We also examined Charles Duhigg’s…
