SOFT SKILLS AT WORK IRENA GRUGULIS AND STEVEN VINCENT
Soft skills and personal qualities are an increasingly important part of work with employees expected to show them in work and assessed on them at recruitment, appraisal and promotion. However, there have also been claims that judging soft skills may simply be an expression of individual and collective prejudice with gender, race and class used to stereotype workers. This case study provides descriptions of two groups of workers in different organisations who had varying experiences of soft skills. Read the descriptions and answer the questions below.

Benefit caseworkers in TCS Total Customer Services (TCS) was an outsourcing company with a contract with a London council to do housing benefit processing, work which required intermediate-level skills. The housing benefit caseworkers were expected to demonstrate customer focus, attitude, flexibility and endurance with managers condemning the ‘9 to 5’ mentality of the public sector and new staff was screened for positive attitudes. Initial technical training was dramatically reduced and instead staff was taught about punctuality, personal presentation and attitude. A reception desk was set up to deal with customer claimants. The work involved was largely unskilled and staff had difficulty returning to the skilled work of claims processing after stints on reception. Despite protests, women were preferred for this task since the manager considered them naturally better at it and 16 of the 20 reception workers were women.

In claims processing, new managers were chosen for their soft skills (and particularly whether they were considered ‘TCS people’) rather than their occupational knowledge and some had no experience of housingbenefit at all. Performance was monitored by statistics and claims staff lost their professional discretion. IT consultants in FutureTech FutureTech provided outsourced computing and IT services to Govco, a large government department. Its workers were highly skilled and new entrants were all graduates. Consultants were expected to be customerfocused, flexible and to actively work towards ensuring harmony in the relationship between the two firms; while graduates were hired as enthusiastic self-starters who were responsible for their own learning and development.

Extensive training was provided with most time devoted to improving technical knowledge, thoughmuch of the actual work was mundane. Long hours and weekend working were common. Some expatriate US managers on the staff made efforts to introduce motivational techniques and make the British workers more emotional, including encouraging them to stand up and applaud themselves. Graduates were very technically skilled but most avoided learning the details of Govco’s internal systems which were necessary for success internally but had little market value. Instead, they became adept at creating their own developmental opportunities and competing for projects which involved new software. Turnover increased from 2 to 9 per cent overall and was described as ‘dysfunctionally high’ for graduates.
Questions
1 What soft skills were required in the two organisations? What sort of balance was there between soft skills and technical skills?
2 What effect did this have on (a) the workers, (b) their work and (c) their employers? Whom did the soft skills benefit?
3 How does knowing about workers’ technical skills help us to understand this?
4 Think about another job that you are familiar with. What soft skills and what technical skills are required? Do they advantage the employee or the employer?
5 What effect does an emphasis on soft skills have on workers? For further details of this case study see Grugulis and Vincent (2009).