According to the Institute for the Future (IFTF), social intelligence will be a critical skill both for managing relationships and adapting to new kinds of workplace organizations, including both off-line and online contexts.

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New forms of digital labor, like micro-work and crowdsourcing, demand that people quickly establish rapport with distributed teams, frequently composed of colleagues they will never actually meet in person…. Those with greater social intelligence will likely have much better luck in connecting to opportunities.

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While developing social intelligence is important for online success, it is also critical to success in the traditional sense. In face-to-face interactions, social intelligence is an increasingly important skill, informed by our growing understandings of human behavior, including the profit-margin implications of how well staff are treated. Conversely, lack of social intelligence is becoming less tolerable, especially in key supervisory positions.

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Importantly, social intelligence will need to extend to international cultures and situations due to increase in the number of multinational teams and projects that the average worker engages with throughout his or her career. In this environment, the ability to connect across potential cultural differences will not only be a key factor organizational efficiency, but also as a basic component of a successful career and pleasant work environment.

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Ultimately, social intelligence may become a widely recognized competitive advantage. As a growing number of rote tasks become automated, social intelligence is likely to remain a relative strength of human workers. With robotics and smart machines assuming a more central role in future work and production, we may see new emphasis on tasks that involve the interpersonal skills unique to humans...

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In the context of social technologies, more flexible work teams, and increasing automation, interpersonal skills and intelligence are poised to play an ever greater role in the ways we work.

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http://www.iftf.org/fileadmin/user_upload/downloads/wfi/ACTF_IFTF_FutureSkills-report.pdf