Hi there,
I can understand your predicament, how employees take soft skills lightly but there are various ways to make your employees take you & the soft skills your training them on seriously.
Performance Appraisal
•Evaluate your performance appraisal method the organization has adopted, my suggestion that if you use performance appraisal by objective this will help you narrow down where training is required,
•Ensure that soft skills your training your employees on are part of their performance appraisal as part of competence required.
•Ensure that soft skills is part of your training and development i.e. your training and development is divided to 3 sections job requirement training, soft skills and technical skills.
Competence Mapping Vs Training Needs Analysis
Try taking on competence mapping project and do the following
•identify generic competence required by the organization as a whole, make sure that these competences vary between different levels of the organizations i.e. junior/ supervisor/ manager, Senior Manger, general manager, director, CEO.
•identify competence required by the positions identified in the organization using job descriptions/ personal specification (JD/ PS) ,
•identify existing competences available with the employees
•Do gap analysis between required competences by the position and the existing competence with in the employees
Training & Development
From the competence mapping exercise it will help you identify how much training is required to be done to close the gap between existing and required skills technical or soft,
Once you have done all the above and communicated to individual employees this will create the following
•Employees will realize that the organistion is serious about training them
•Organsiation is serious and concern about employees development in the organization
•It give employees sense of direction they will know where they are standing and where they are going,
In my opinion if you consider al the above your employees will take your training suggestions vey seriously.
I hope the information I have provided is very useful