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S5.T&D Exercise

Soft skills were increasingly emphasized over technical skills in two outsourcing companies. At TCS, which processed housing benefits, soft skills like flexibility and attitude were prioritized over claims processing experience. Women were preferred for customer service roles. IT consultants at FutureTech were expected to ensure client harmony, but technical training was reduced in favor of motivational techniques. Emphasizing soft skills benefited employers by reducing training costs and increasing control over workers. However, it disadvantaged some employees by limiting opportunities and increasing turnover. The balance between technical and soft skills affected both worker autonomy and employer oversight.

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58 views1 page

S5.T&D Exercise

Soft skills were increasingly emphasized over technical skills in two outsourcing companies. At TCS, which processed housing benefits, soft skills like flexibility and attitude were prioritized over claims processing experience. Women were preferred for customer service roles. IT consultants at FutureTech were expected to ensure client harmony, but technical training was reduced in favor of motivational techniques. Emphasizing soft skills benefited employers by reducing training costs and increasing control over workers. However, it disadvantaged some employees by limiting opportunities and increasing turnover. The balance between technical and soft skills affected both worker autonomy and employer oversight.

Uploaded by

Phạm Hồng Sơn
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SOFT SKILLS AT WORK

Irena Grugulis & 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
TCS was an outsourcing company with a contract with a Hanoi 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 were screened
for positive attitudes. Initial technical training was dramatically reduced and instead staff were
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 housing benefit 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 customer-focused, 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, though much of the actual
work was mundane. Long hours and weekend working were common. Some expatriate
Japanese managers on the staff made efforts to introduce motivational techniques and make
the Vietnamese 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?

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