The ability to collaborate, communicate, think critically, manage your calendar, and manage interpersonal relationships is crucial for the ongoing operation of your organization. Unfortunately, these soft skills are not always easy to teach, and it can sometimes be difficult to justify using limited time and resources to focus on improving them when faced with an onslaught of critical daily tasks.

The truth is that soft skills are a deceptively important part of the workplace and cultivating them in your managers and employees is just as important as reinforcing the hard skills. In this article, we will look at some further reasons why they matter, the effect that developing them further can have on your team, which skills to focus on, and how to best assess existing skills and scaffold for additional development.

Why Soft Skills Matter in Laboratory Environments

Soft skills, especially communication and the ability to collaborate, have a direct impact on patient safety and error prevention. Improved communication and emotional intelligence can preclude poor communication during shift changes, awkward hand-offs, or delayed test reporting.

As in many workplaces, errors can often be rooted in unclear expectations for conduct or even conflict avoidance. If people don’t have the required social skills to address a problem, it can make them reticent to address the issue without additional help.

Another area in which these skills matter is when it comes to compliance and accreditation. CAP, TJC, and CLIA all emphasize communication, conflict resolution, and ethical behavior as cornerstones of quality laboratory culture.

Soft skill lapses can contribute to behavior related deficiencies such as inadequate documentation or even unreported quality control failures.

Finally, the absence of soft skills has a direct impact on both team performance and morale. Labs with limited or poor communication are more likely to experience employee burnout, turnover, and errors.

What are the Key Soft Skills to Focus on?

• Communication: Clear reporting, status updates, escalation
• Collaboration: Coordinating shared responsibilities, resolving conflict
• Adaptability: Adjusting to change in workload, equipment, or policy
• Ethical judgment: Handling borderline or questionable practices
• Time management: Prioritizing tasks, meeting TATs
• Accountability and professionalism

How to Assess Soft Skills in a Lab Context

Developing these skills is important but that by itself will not improve your organization. You also need to be able to accurately assess them.

Some of the best ways you can assess the soft skills of any employee are:

Observation: Create a rubric of soft skill criteria, distribute it to your employees, and then begin to measure how well they perform during onboarding (if they’re new), during routine procedures or assessments, or during handoffs between departments.

Scenario-based evaluations: Ask your employees scenario-based questions like “What would you do if a coworker skipped a step in a quality control procedure?”

Self, Peer, and Supervisor Evaluation: Distribute self-evaluation forms to your employees and see how they rate themselves. Allowing employees to give self-feedback helps guide any potential remediations and empowers employees with a sense of trust. Having their performance anonymously rated by peers and managers ensures that there is a wide range of feedback from multiple perspectives.

Developing and Remediating Soft Skills

When it comes to further developing or even remediating skills training, there are a few different options available.

• Assigning senior techs or leads to support soft skill development is a great way to build cohesion and boost peer-led learning.
• Offer flexible training or skill development programs that are self-paced.

• For those flagged during assessments, create tailored improvement plans with follow-up

Elevating soft skills to thesame level of importance as technical abilities ensures your team is not only inspection-ready but also resilient, ethical, and collaborative. In a regulated environment, people skills aren’t optional but foundational.

If you’d like to learn more about how StaffReady can help empower you to solve these issues using our clinical workforce management tools, you can book a meeting with one of our experts here.