Having an emotionally intelligent workforce can minimize employee conflicts and foster healthy interpersonal relationships. The net effects are increased staff morale and enhanced workplace productivity.
Not every employee comes to your company possessing proper emotional intelligence. Fortunately, you can help impart these skills through rigorous, ongoing training.
Here’s a guide to emotional intelligence training, focusing on its core benefits.
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What Is Emotional Intelligence?
The benefits of imparting emotional intelligence in your employees are immense, as you’re about to find out.
But before we explore the perks of emotional intelligence training, it’s important to understand what the skill entails.
Emotional intelligence, colloquially abbreviated as EQ, refers to the capacity to completely understand and control one’s emotions.
The term is commonly applied to scenarios that require an individual to navigate social relationships in a judicious and empathetic manner. However, emotional intelligence has proven useful in various situations, including day-to-day employee interactions.
What Is Emotional Intelligence Training?
Emotional intelligence training is essentially a program aimed at imparting emotional intelligence skills in a person.
EQ has recently become one of the most sought-after soft skills by recruiters. The skill is especially significant for companies that actively manage large clientele with diverse needs, such as telecommunication firms.
There are two different ways to conduct emotional intelligence training in the workplace.
Some companies prefer to have their staffers train in off-site programs in unfamiliar environments. However, you could opt for the more practical on-site approach, in which the training is integrated into your employees’ day-to-day routines.
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What Are The Benefits Of Emotional Intelligence Training?
1. Reduces Workplace Conflicts
No office is immune from conflicts. Whether it’s employees feuding over paycheck disparity or alleged mistreatment by their superiors, these conflicts can adversely affect your workplace productivity.
Emotional intelligence training aims to help your employees better manage their emotions. Beneficiaries can recognize their negative feelings, which is instrumental in controlling how they respond to potentially explosive situations.
Employees who have received emotional intelligence training are also happy to take full responsibility for their actions. This reduces buck-passing, a major cause of employee conflicts.
Moreover, EQ training can help employees better manage their expectations. This can be particularly beneficial when interacting with short-fused colleagues. It prevents one from making statements that could drive the other person over the edge.
2. Enhances Communication Skills
Communication isn’t all about spoken words. It also entails expressing our feelings judiciously in situations where recklessness might have far-reaching implications.
Emotional intelligence training enhances communication skills by helping employees recognize and categorize emotions. It teaches them to harness positive emotions for the greater good and stifle negative feelings that could jeopardize otherwise healthy workplace relationships.
For instance, a staffer naturally given to anger will learn more about the negative consequences of reacting emotionally. When a situation threatens to degenerate, such an employee will know better than to let their emotions get the better of them.
Emotionally intelligent employees are also slow to judge their fellow colleagues at face value. Instead, they’re eager to engage their coworkers in meaningful conversations to understand their behaviors.
3. Fosters Leadership Skills
Leadership skills aren’t learned overnight. However, conducting routine, emotional intelligence training can accelerate the process.
Beneficiaries of emotional intelligence training tend to exhibit certain leadership traits that are conspicuously lacking in their low-EQ counterparts. Noteworthy examples include self-control and empathy.
Self-control can be particularly beneficial when handling workplace crises. It allows an employee to apply logic in every reasoning rather than approach the situation emotionally.
On the other hand, empathy is essential when engaging with grieving, upset, or disgruntled coworkers. It prevents one from saying things that could exacerbate one’s mental suffering.
Empathy may also be useful when dealing with problematic customers. It ensures that your employees maintain a professional image amidst the chaos.
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4. Helps Handle Constructive Criticism
What happens when you approach a low-EQ coworker in a soft tone of voice and ask them to pull up their socks?
Well, their reaction will likely be negative.
Depending on how deplorable the staffer’s emotional intelligence skills are, your honest feedback will be met with an immediate rebuttal. The employee might confront you right away and rumble on how they’re pulling their full weight to help the company grow.
Such are the behavioral limitations that emotional intelligence training can address.
Emotional intelligence training will impart to your employees the skills required to deal with constructive criticism, such as saying thank you and acting on every feedback.
5. Encourages Accountability
We’ve already identified buck-passing as one of the leading causes of workplace conflicts. It’s exciting to learn that emotional intelligence training can help cure this negative behavior.
Not only does EQ training prepare your workforce for future scenarios that require them to tactically manage and express emotions, but the programs may also foster a sense of accountability in their day-to-day operations.
Through emotional intelligence training, your employees will understand that mistakes do happen. But it’s their reactions that make the difference.
Emotional intelligence training will give your employees the skills they need to address defensiveness and uncooperativeness, the two biggest enemies of accountability.
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Summary
Conducting regular emotional intelligence training is essential to fostering a cohesive workplace. The skills learned may also help your staffers develop healthy social relationships outside the office environment.
Emotional intelligence training is one of the most enriching employee development programs you could ever adopt in your company.
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