Taking a step back to move forward: understanding communication skills and their characteristics in the workplace

ABSTRACT Soft skills have been increasingly recognised as important in the workplace. They have been incorporated, moreover, in education and training curricula internationally. However, their conceptualisation lacks in theoretical grounding. This study fills this gap by taking a skills-utilisation approach (rather than a skills-requirements approach) and studying communication skills in the Human Resource function of two organisations, Flow and Energy. Key informants were participants in the events that were theoretically sampled (e.g. employees, candidates). Observations of interactions between HR professionals and their interlocutors, combined with conversations, interviews and organisational documents provided the data corpus. The analysis combined the key mechanics of grounded theory and discourse analysis. The conceptual framework drew on situated learning. Results indicate that communication skills should not be seen as decontextualised communication behaviours. Instead, communication skills require constant manoeuvring and alignment of communication behaviour (what people do) with the following three factors: the aim of the communication encounter, the actors’ positional identities and the various forms of knowing they bring to the practice. This view unveils the tentative and elusive (rather than transferrable and universally applicable) nature of communication skills. Such an evidence-driven conceptualisation has implications for how soft skills should be researched, understood and developed/accredited.