Soft skills are only becoming more important in the modern workplace environments. Multiple research studies show that soft and people skills are six times more important than hard skills for professional/job success. Lack of these skills lead to significant financial losses for companies and hinder an employee’s career advancement. A study by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) says that small businesses lose an average of$420K per year and large businesses lose $62.4mn per year, just because of poor communication – let alone lack of other soft skills – at work.

Many companies understand the need and are bridging the gap by offering training programs and coaching to its employees. The Covid-19 pandemic has further highlighted the importance of workplace culture and employee well-being, making the need for effective soft skills training more pressing than ever. Unlike the hard skills, soft skills take repeated efforts and much more practice. Inability to measuresoft skills compounds the issue and makes it challenging for employees to get feedback, learn and improve as well as lack of this quantifiable data makes it hard for companies to incentivize their employees.

This is where Thriving Springs comes in. Thriving Springs’ platform  focuses on building intrinsic skills like empathy, mindfulness and alignment etc., which are core to building extrinsic skills such as leadership, strategic thinking, problem-solving, negotiating skills etc. . The platform follows a three-pronged approach – training, implementation, and measurement. For training, the company offers various formats: self-paced video courses, in-built individual and group practices, live masterclasses and one-on-one coaching sessions. For implementation and real-time feedback, they are building a Generative AI based EQ assistant which helps people put emotional intelligence skills in practice in the flow of their work, for example, while writing an email. The employee’s engagement from the first two offerings gives the dashboard visualization to measure and incentivize the performance. Understanding the diverse needs and cultural traits of its customers, Thriving Springs provides customisable offering to each organisation and team based on their industry or/ job functions using a proprietary skills mapping framework.

We are extremely excited about our partnership with Rishii Dhand on this journey. Rishii comeswith almost two decades of experience in product management, having led Google Workspaces and Google Pay in India. Equally importantly, Rishii’s passion and ability to train people in emotional Intelligence is well demonstrated from his side, passion project where he trained over 1500+ employees across organisations while at Google. He has taken a unique and holistic approach; not only does the company provide customised learning and practice, but also, the emphasis on real-time implementation and measurement is a significant step ahead of its peers. This approach enables Thriving Springs to deliver more effectively on the outcomes sought by organisations and their employees. This fits in well with our core philosophy of a customer outcomes-driven approach, which is also important to create the pull and repeat usage of the solution. The estimated ~$25bn global soft skills training market, growing at 12.3% is fragmented and will benefit tremendously from the platform-first approach of Thriving Springs and we are excited to see how the journey unfolds.