Soft Skills You Need for Any Job
Every job comes with its own set of required skills and qualifications. With remote work, though, some soft skills are needed regardless of your job position or industry.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, remote work has been steadily increasing. Remote work once only made up 4% of high-paying jobs, yet it stands at 15% today. With remote work becoming more commonplace every day, you yourself might be considering a remote or hybrid position. In this article, we’ll look at 4 soft skills you need to leverage yourself as a remote employee.
Time management
Working remotely often comes with the benefit of flexible scheduling. It gives you a better sense of freedom with your own time. You don’t have to worry about scheduling and requesting time off if you need an afternoon or a few hours off for an appointment or picking your kids up from school. That said, when working remotely, you don’t have your boss down the hall to ensure work is done.
Time management is necessary for all work models but is highly emphasized with remote workers. Some employees innately have this trait, while others might not. If you fall under the latter, there is hope! Time management skills can be built and improved, making you a star remote employee.
Cultural literacy
Remote work models allow hiring managers to hire free of borders. In other words, geography is no longer a limitation. Employers can expand their talent pools to the entire country and beyond without anyone having to make any permanent moves. With companies making more genuine efforts towards diversity and inclusion, workplaces aren’t as homogenous as they once were. So not only are employees working across different timezones and locations, but they are also working with others from varying cultures, languages and ages. This is why cultural literacy, or the ability to understand the traditions and history of those from different cultures, is an essential aspect of remote work.
Communication
Working remotely requires excellent communication skills, particularly writing. With so many different platforms remote workers use, like Signal, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack etc., employees need to understand how to navigate each of them. How you communicate on each channel differs wildly. You wouldn’t communicate over email the same way you would on a platform like Signal. You don’t want to forget about verbal communication, either. You still need to know how to conduct yourself when you go into the office or attend meetings via video chat.
Knowing when to clock out
While this doesn’t seem like a skill, it’s crucial to maintaining a work-life balance. Unplugging at the end of the day can be challenging for some employees. When you work from home, it’s as if you never leave the office. Checking one last email or finishing up work outside of your work hours is a slippery slope.
Creating boundaries between your personal and work life is essential to your well-being and productivity. Boundaries create a healthy work-life balance, preventing burnout and improving your physical, mental and emotional well-being.
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Live Assets is a boutique IT Staffing/Recruiting firm specializing exclusively in building IT teams of excellence for the Information Technology sector.
We are a small, but productive team that works closely together and has had a 96% success rate for the past number of years!
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