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Soft skills are crucial for employee well-being because they contribute to effective communication, collaboration, and interpersonal relationships in the workplace. These skills, which include communication, teamwork, adaptability, empathy, and emotional intelligence, play a significant role in creating a positive and supportive work environment.
Strong, soft-skilled employees can navigate challenges more effectively, manage stress, and build meaningful connections with colleagues.
In this podcast, Raluca Apostol discusses the importance of soft skills and their impact on wellbeing.
Key Takeaways
- Raluca founded Nestor on the back of her own burnout. Her lived experience is why she treats soft skills as a wellbeing lever, not a performance-review checkbox.
- Soft skills are the backbone of hybrid-era collaboration. With employees spanning Boomers through Gen Z and working across devices, locations, and backgrounds, interpersonal skill is what keeps distributed teams from fragmenting.
- Emotional intelligence is the everyday stress regulator at work. Reading non-verbal cues, managing your own reactions, and adjusting to others' lets teams defuse conflicts before they escalate — and is the core trait companies now demand from authentic leaders.
- Time management is a soft skill that protects work-life balance. Prioritising the top three tasks beats trying to do ten at once; resilience and adaptability absorb what prioritisation can't.
- Positivity is measurably engagement-linked. Raluca cites research that optimistic employees stay more engaged and lift team morale — organisations explicitly screen for it now.
- Soft skills can be measured like technical skills — via behaviours. Pulse surveys tied to company values and 360-degree feedback surface strengths and gaps, and give managers a map for targeted training programs.
- Soft skills are power skills because they transfer. A good manager on one project adapts to another team, another industry — which is why leadership development should prioritise them over certifications.
In Raluca's Words
On why soft skills matter now
Skills, and soft skills in particular, have become the backbone of any successful organisation that wants to thrive today. If you want competitive advantage and to overcome any unseen challenge, you have to build communication and interpersonal skills among employees.
You cannot work in isolation. Even if you are remote and physically alone in a room, you work together with other people to achieve common goals.
On emotional intelligence at work
People with strong emotional intelligence can understand, manage, and use their own emotions — and the emotions of others. You identify non-verbal cues and adjust your behaviour so you can eliminate stress from the equation.
Being self-aware is part of being emotionally intelligent. It gives clarity in both personal and professional life — that's where real work-life balance starts.
Emotional intelligence is a core characteristic of authentic leaders. Companies are looking for leaders who can inspire others, coach their direct reports, and be genuinely interested in their people.
On stress and resilience
You cannot do 10 things great at the same time. Take the first three most important ones for you — it's much easier to cope with stress that way.
When you're resilient, you take challenges as they come. You learn from the past and adapt to different situations with an open mind about things you cannot control.
People with higher positivity and optimism are more engaged at work. When you come in with a positive attitude, you influence other people's emotions and lift the morale of the whole team.
On measuring and building soft skills in the organisation
You can measure soft skills the same way you measure technical skills — through behaviours. Pulse surveys tied to your company values tell you what the team actually needs to work on.
Combine pulse data with 360 feedback. That's how you identify strengths, development areas, and hidden strengths — and it's how leaders learn about themselves as managers.
Soft skills are transferable across roles, departments, and industries. That's why they're often called power skills — and why every leadership-development program should be built on them.
About the Speaker
Raluca Apostol is co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Nestor, the People Intelligence Platform that helps organizations unlock the Power of Skills to drive workforce agility, higher performance, and continuous growth. With a Ph.D. in machine learning, she leads the research and product development at Nestor. She deeply cares about customer success and makes sure that every employee using the product is becoming better every day.
Connect with Raluca on Linkedin.
Show Notes
01:27 Would you tell us about your wellness journey?
02:49 How do soft skills such as communication and interpersonal skills contribute to a positive work environment and overall employee well-being?
06:54 In what ways can emotional intelligence (EQ) impact an employee's mental and emotional well-being in the workplace?
10:48 How do strong soft skills help employees cope with workplace stress and maintain a healthier work-life balance?
14:50 What impact do soft skills have on enhancing employee self-confidence and self-esteem, which are essential for well-being?
16:16 What strategies can organizations implement to assess and measure the impact of soft skills on employee well-being?
21:56 Would you like to share some valuable suggestions with our listeners?
