The role of emotional competences in the changing workplace

Article by Diego Ingrassia – “The role of emotional skills in the changing workplace” – October 2021_UNIVERSO CONSULTING_HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

Today it is perfectly normal to talk about soft skills and emphasise their importance for effective performance.

It is interesting, however, to note that the need to observe and understand work performance, beyond its technical-specialist component, arose and developed at a time when the increasing complexity of the world of work sent the old ‘task culture‘ into crisis, perfectly capable of describing, through extensive and detailed job descriptions, what a person ‘has to do’ in the workplace. Suddenly it seemed clear that the best performers were able to achieve their results through high levels of discretion, and all of this the old job descriptions were no longer able to describe.

The “human factor” had become an indispensable element; hence the need to develop models and methods capable of understanding it.
This awareness, together with the increasing amount of research supporting these orientations, created a slow but significant trend reversal over time. In the current scenario, in the face of the imposing and sudden change caused by the pandemic crisis, flexibility and discretionary skills once again impose themselves as indispensable qualities to best interpret a changing world of work. What one ‘had to do’ in a prearranged way leaves room for a less defined ‘what one can do’, guided by new skills, aware of having now abandoned the old certainties of the ‘workplace’, understood as a stable physical place of reference, and of ‘working time’, no longer marked by the clear distinction that had long characterised our lives. A picture, the one just described, that contrary to what one might think makes the sphere of soft skills even more important, and in particular those aspects that can be traced back to emotional skills, a true strategic resource to better manage the aforementioned ‘human factor’, a vital component too often left to the common sense and subjectivity of individuals.

The reduced possibility of managing relationship dynamics in their natural location, physical space, imposes the ability to do so using modern communication technologies, and this requires greater attention and competence: instinctive gestures must be replaced by conscious speech. It is therefore necessary to be able to value these skills in an organisational optic, paying particular attention to selection processes, the identification of talent, and the construction of precise training paths for the management of employees.

We all know how important it is to be able to find the right people, and we also know how complicated it is, in the often limited time available, to understand who we are dealing with. A situation made more complex today because of the countless information available on the web within the various social networks. This fact calls for serious reflection on an activity that is much more exposed than in the past to the risk of a misleading assessment due to the presence of information that could deviate considerably from reality.

Thesocial desirability factor, always lurking in any form of self-presentation, finds in fact a particularly large and completely new space within these communication tools. Risks that are added to the more traditional errors fuelled by the intuition of the moment and to all the distortions caused by an excess of subjectivity in decisions linked to evaluative processes, almost always to our cognitive bias. Counteracting these risks is possible, starting with a commitment to develop adequate skills in those who are responsible for managing staff and carrying out evaluation activities.

In particular, the ability to observe and the sensitivity of practitioners must improve in order to extend the investigation to the sphere of emotions and motivations. Valuing, therefore, in the management of interviews, those aspects linked to emotional intelligence that play a decisive role in the balance of the evaluation process. The Emotive Behavioural Analysis, which derives from emotion studies, represents a scientific methodology to support this challenging task. It is a very effective observation tool that allows important emotion-related signals to be picked up and verified instantly through targeted questions.