Dr. Md Asadul Islam :
Emotional intelligence (also known as emotional quotient or EQ) means individual ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions as well as others’ emotions. It is a significant ability of people to understand, use and manage emotions positively to reduce stress, empathise with others, overcome challenges, communicate efficiently and effectively and resolve conflicts. It helps a person connect his or her feelings, turning intention into actions and contributing to making wise decisions about what matters most to them. Hence, it helps us build a stronger personal and professional relationship, succeed in family and work life and gain personal and career goals.
Emotional intelligence mainly includes four attributes such as self-management, self-awareness, social awareness and relationship management. In this respect, self-management allows us to control impulsive feelings and behaviors, manage emotions in a healthy process, maintain commitment, and adapt to changing situations. However, self-awareness enables us to identify our own emotions affecting our thoughts and behavior. It also helps identify individual strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, social awareness includes empathy to understand others’ needs, issues, concerns, emotions. It also helps identify power dynamics in teams, groups, organisations and eventually in society so that we can feel comfortable in the place where we live and work. Finally, the relationship management of emotional intelligence helps us communicate clearly, develop and maintain good relationships, motivate others and stay committed in the workplace or family, managing conflicts positively.
Based on the above arguments, it is clear that emotional intelligence is very significant for everyone around us, not only the leaders in business or other organisations. The business environment changes according to the changes in the internal and external stakeholders, but the change directly or indirectly impact employees working in different organisations. Therefore, their emotional mindset is bound to change. Still, some employees do not welcome change, and they tend to feel left out or sometimes make conflicts in the organisations due to a lack of emotional intelligence. The COVID-19 pandemic has made business operations ever-complicated in every corner of the world, turning most of the manual process into technological automation, which is not always user-friendly for every employee working in various organisations.
Furthermore, the technologies keep change and technology or process, which is useful today may not be useful tomorrow that compelled employees to learn the process of using new technologies to execute operations and stay in the organisations. However, technological knowledge and intention to use technologies among many employees (even graduates) in Bangladesh is too poor. Therefore, many business organisations are facing huge problems to make employees enable to use technologies. In this respect, many organisations laid off employees due to their lack of adaptability to technologies. This is one of the dark sides of the COVID-19 pandemic with many other tensions that make employees anxious, for example, work-family conflicts, changing rules of governments, price hikes, uncertain future and so on.
As a result, the rate of conflicts in organisations and even in families has increased during this COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, organizational leaders are facing a critical challenge to maintain discipline and production level high. In this respect, many people think that emotional intelligence is only required for leaders in private and public sector organisations. However, I’m afraid that’s not right as it is necessary for all to keep everyone calm, engaged, committed and motivated in the workplace.
Many business organisations are now widely adopting the industry 4.0 tools and processes in Bangladesh along with the mechanisms of Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and so on. In this respect, a considerable change will occur in the near future as the current government is tirelessly working to develop a tech-oriented productive and service industrial country to achieve aspired dream of becoming a developed country in 2041. In this respect, developing emotional intelligence of employees is critical to make them welcoming and enable to adapt those technological disruptions to maintaintheir performance at work ensuring their good mental health. However, it can be developed if the organisations and government widely offer and organize training for all employees rather than leaders. In this respect, recruiting local foreign experts on emotional intelligence could be effective in training our employees as well as leaders of various organisations.
Furthermore, the lecturers and other employees in universities can also be given training on emotional intelligence so that they can apply in their lectures to develop students’ emotional intelligence ability. This would help to establish a chain of educated people who would display and motivate self-management, self-awareness, social awareness and relationship management attributes in their personal and professional life. As a result, conflicts in the organisations, families and eventually in societies would be considerably reduced to create a healthy and prosperous country, Bangladesh, which we dream of.
(Dr. Asadul Islam teaches in Swinburne University of Technology, Malaysia. Email: [email protected])
