Preventing soft skill decay among early-career women in STEM during COVID-19: Evidence from a longitudinal intervention
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2123105119
As the workforce shifts to being predominantly hybrid and remote, how can companies help employees—particularly early-career women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields—develop greater confidence in their soft skills, shown to improve organizational retention?
We evaluate the effects of an online longitudinal intervention to develop soft skills among early-career women employees at a North American biotechnology company during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Controlling for baseline levels collected immediately prior to nationwide lockdowns, we find that a 6-month online intervention increased early-career women’s assessments of their soft skills at work by an average of 9% (P < 0.001), compared with a decrease of about 3.5% for a matched control group (P < 0.05), resulting in an average treatment effect of nearly 13% on the treated group.
Furthermore, we find evidence that the intervention led to an increase in manager-assessed performance for early-career women relative to employees not in the intervention, and that overall, increased self-assessments of soft skill competencies were associated with greater odds of retention. Results show how employee soft skill development was affected by the pandemic and provide insights for a feasible and cost-effective method to train and engage a hybrid or fully remote workforce.
Overall, we found a decay in soft skills among early-career women in STEM working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining longitudinal data collected from employees at a large US biotechnology company, we found that early-career women reported a significant decline in perceived soft skills by 3.5% from pre–COVID-19 baseline levels. Yet early-career women who participated in an online intervention program consisting of peer groups and one-on-one coaching were not only shielded from soft skill decay, they also experienced a growth in their perceived soft skills by more than 9% during the same period, resulting in an average treatment effect of nearly 13% on the treated group. We further found that the intervention was associated with employees receiving higher performance evaluations from their managers, while also having important implications for employee retention.
For the online intervention program, we created four peer groups consisting of the same 11 members in each meeting over the course of the intervention. Prior to the first coaching or peer-group meeting (and before moving to remote work), the women attended an in-person information session at the company in February 2020. Participants were split between two women facilitators employed by the engagement platform. Each facilitator oversaw one set of 11 participants in group A and another set of 11 participants in group B to ensure that both treatment groups were exposed to the same two facilitators.
Beginning in March 2020, when nationwide lockdowns began, women participants started meeting once or twice monthly for an hour with their peer group or just the facilitator (acting as a career coach) to discuss predesignated topics. Many of these topics related to the development of professional soft skills, such as strategies for communicating with confidence and leading with influence (SI Appendix, Table S7). Participants set individual career goals using the online platform tools that they either reviewed with their coach or discussed in their facilitated peer groups each month. Outside of these topics, participants also had the opportunity to disclose in their peer-group meetings and coaching sessions any personal and professional challenges that they were experiencing.§