ROI“Psychological safety - Team members feeling safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other - was far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found that set successful teams apart.”

- Google

In the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work for, research shows that “trust between managers and employees is the primary defining characteristic of the very best workplaces.” These companies “beat the average annualized returns of the S&P 500 by a factor of three.”

- Great Place to Work

“If learning leaders focus more effort and resources on building the soft skills required for leadership, the payoff can be significant. Organizations demonstrated an average return on investment of $4,000 for every $1,100 spent developing soft skills.” - Development Dimensions International

“Executives overwhelmingly indicated that integrity and communication were the top two soft skills needed by employees in today’s workplace.”

- Business Communication Quarterly

“Initiatives and programs that fostered a resilient and mentally healthy workplace returned $2.30 for every dollar spent — with the return coming in the form of lower health care costs, higher productivity, lower absenteeism and decreased turnover.”

- PwC as cited in Harvard Business Review

“The vast majority of employers consider soft skills just as important as hard skills when it comes to evaluating candidates for a job, and 16 percent even say they’re more important.” - Career Builder

“Ask senior executives what their biggest concern is and they will all tell you the same thing. It’s talent possessing some specific soft skills beyond conventional business and engineering training. Five essential talents that companies need emerged in research: intellectual curiosity, 360-degree thinking, cultural competence, empathy, and adaptability.” - Fortune

“When something happens at work—some workday event—it immediately triggers cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. People’s minds start ‘sense making’: they try to figure out why the event happened and what its implications are. Depending on what happens with these cognitive and emotional processes, motivation can shift, which, in turn, affects how people perform their work. Clearly, inner work life matters to performance— how creatively people will think, how much commitment they will show to their work, how collegial they will be, how productive they will be.” - Harvard Business Review

Investing in our people changes everything.

GoogleRozovsky, J. (2015). The five keys to a successful Google team. Re: Work Google,Retrieved from: https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys- to-a- successful-google- team/

Great Place to Work (2016)Fortune 100 best companies to work for list 2017. Great Place to Work.Retrieved from: https://clients.greatplacetowork.com/list-calendar/fortune- 100-best-companies-to- work-for

Developmental Dimensions International (2015)Ready-now leaders: 25 findings to meet tomorrow’s business challenges. Global leadership forecast 2014 – 2015.Retrieved from: https://www.ddiworld.com/DDI/media/trend-research/global- leadership-forecast- 2014-2015_tr_ddi.pdf?ext=.pdf

Business Communication QuarterlyRobles, M. M. (2012). Executive Perceptions of the Top 10 Soft Skills Needed in Today’s Workplace. Retrieved from: Business Communication Quarterly, 75(4), 453-465.doi:10.1177/1080569912460400

PwC as cited in Harvard Business ReviewFernandez, R. (2016). 5 ways to boost your resilience at work. Harvard Business ReviewRetrieved from: https://hbr.org/2016/06/627-building-resilience-ic-5-ways-to-build-your-personal-resilience-at-work

CareerBuilder (2014)Overwhelming majority of companies say soft skills are just as important as hard skills, according to a new CareerBuilder survey. CareerBuilder.Retrieved from: http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx?sd=4/10/2014&siteid=cbpr&sc_cmp1=cbpr817_&id=pr817&ed=12/31/2014

FortuneWilson, E. J. (2015). 5 skills employers want that you won’t see in a job ad. Retrieved from: http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/5-skills- employers-want- that-you- wont-see- in-a- job-ad/

Harvard Business ReviewAmabile, T. & Kramer, S. J. (2007). Inner work life: Understanding the subtext of business performance. Harvard Business ReviewRetrieved from: https://hbr.org/2016/06/627-building-resilience-ic-5-ways-to-build-your-personal-resilience-at-work

Sources