Would money talk?

A week ago we opened Pandora's box - the discussion about the importance of soft skills at the workplace.

And yes, yes, we know - it’s a topic talked about by everybody and everywhere. Kind of like a debate over politics at the dinner table - loads of opinions with zero results. 

What exactly are the soft skills? And how do you measure the monetary benefit of having those skills trained and developed?

Normally, different articles or specialists would bore you with the Kirkpatrick-Phillips Model to determine the return on investment. But it's a tough nut to crack and, let's be honest, it’s so snooze!

There are easier, more practical ways to understand whether training your people to solve the people-related challenges pays off. You can start by not thinking about how much additional profit you might make. But instead, how much money you can actually save.

For an example, let’s do just a quick calculation on badly run meetings. 

The situation looks something like this: 

A person organises a meeting. 

He invites 9 other people, which makes the total number of attendees 10. To make it simple, we say that every person joining this meeting makes an hourly salary of 10 euros net. In a first glimpse, this meeting costs a company (10 people x 10 euros) 100 euros.

“But it’s their job” you might say, “they get paid to have meetings and make decisions that creates income”. You are right. And also wrong.

You see, 3 people out of 10 did not need to be there. They could have received an informative email instead. 

7 people attending the meeting could have finished the meeting in 30 minutes if the organizer would have empathy to consider other people’s work time their priority. And also build trust and communicate their points across in an effective way. 

(10 - 3) x 10 : 2 = 35

This meeting would cost 35 euros, and would give you a saving of 65 euros each week.

To put numbers into perspective: 

• In a month you would save about 260 euros
• In a year the amount is 3380 euros. 

On 1 meeting!

That can happen, if you choose to invest in those woodoo skills like building rapport, or being a great communicator, or understanding that other people’s work time is valuable. 

Rita is one of those many L&D managers struggling how to find hard arguments for soft skills training and prove its worth to the decision makers.