How to implement effective communication & active listening in organizations

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Have you ever been using your phone or watching something on your laptop that has claimed your attention when someone’s trying to talk to you in person? You can probably hear the person, but you might not be really listening to them. That’s because hearing and listening are two different things. Hearing is just perceiving sound, while listening means turning what you hear into meaningful messages. Often times there's a lot of noise happening around us during the day. So figuring out what you can just hear and what you actually need to listen to can make a big difference at work.

Here's what you will learn in this article:

• Active listening at an organization level.
• Why listening and giving feedback to your team is important.
• Effective asynchronous communication.
• Effective synchronous communication.
• Lead, and talk last and less.
• Best mediums of communication.
• How to overcome unconscious bias.

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Good listeners aren’t generally born with some part of their brain specially formed to process what they hear. They're not super humans not magicians, many of them practice active listening.

Active listening requires that one to listen to what the other person has to say with the intension to learn, why someone feels the way they feel or why they sees things the way they see them and be able to make changes to the situation make them feel understood without making them feel less human or bring them down for having an opinion different from yours, for instance the difference between nodding politely when someone tells you about their workload and actually considering what they’re going through before judging them as lazy or the complaining too much employees.?

Active listening is crucial for CEOs and managers, but not only is it limited to these two roles as it’s important at all levels across the organization.?Really taking in what your team members, clients, customers, and vendors are saying can help you adjust situations to make work better for everyone. Active listening can also help you give better feedback. When you know and understand someone’s issues, it’s easier to give constructive criticism (and avoid hitting an emotional brick wall they’ve put up to guard against hurt feelings).

Let's say for instance, we've a young entrepreneur who is running a food restaurant in a resort town his name is Donald, it's during the holiday and it's their business peak. Donald and his team are working very hard to serve their foreign clients at their best and timely. Then one of the days, Marilyn who happens to be one of his top chef tells Donald that she’s quitting immediately. Donald is in shock with how they've been working together and the impact Marilyn had on the day-to-day success of the restaurant. When he asks why, Marilyn says she’s been telling her for weeks that she’s overworked and dealing with personal issues.

If the young entrepreneur had been practicing active listening, he might have understood that Marilyn wasn’t just doing some average grumbling. This would’ve given him a chance to adjust her workload –?or at least help her feel understood in some way.?

Organizing opportunities to meet and talk with your team about their challenges can take some of the guesswork out of communicating. Having a check-in schedule in some cases can also help you address potential issues before they turn into real problems or losing some of your best stuff at work.?Maybe you’re not naturally driven to dive deep into what people say to you. There are some ways to make active listening a little more easy and beneficial.?

Like we mentioned above on what active listening is, let the person you’re talking to talk. Seriously, don’t cut them off. It gives you a chance to listen and observe them. Plus, they won’t feel like you’re just waiting for your chance to get back to what you were doing before.

Once the person’s had their say, acknowledge their emotions. But don’t assume you completely understand their feelings, either, in case you didn’t hear them accurately. Try, “You seem frustrated,” or, “Sounds like you’re upset about this.”

Next, see if you can summarize what they’ve said to you. Phrases like “It sounds like,” or “So you’re saying,” work well. Highlight what you think the key points are, too –?when it comes to listening, accuracy benefits everyone.

If there is anything you’re confused about or you didn't get quite well, don’t pretend to have some sort of mind meld with them. Get clarification.?Have the person you’re talking to confirm your understanding or have them explain a point they’ve made in more detail.

When it’s clear you do get what they’re saying, respond with empathy. You can say, “I see why this matters to you,” or, “I can understand why you’d feel like that.” Remember: A little understanding goes a long way.

How effective leaders communicate with their subordinates affects how motivated and productive they are, and how well leaders communicate with their entire team affects how the team members communicate with each other, as well as how motivated and productive they are.

So, if one of your objectives is to be effective as a leader, you’ll need to communicate effectively at work. But a big obstacle to achieving that is misunderstanding the nature of communication itself. Active communication isn’t one problem to solve. It’s two.

There’s active/effective asynchronous communication and active/effective synchronous communication. The rules for each vary just like the method of communication varies.

Asynchronous communication is communication that happens between people that doesn’t happen in real-time. It means any kind of communication that is sent at one time and received at another. Email probably came to mind first as a form of asynchronous communication at work, but memos, voicemails, videos, books, and a lot of other mediums of communication also count as asynchronous. But while all of it counts, the vast majority of asynchronous communication is text-based: emails, text messages, and the like. So, for this article, we’ll stick to text-based communication.

Synchronous communications is communication?that which takes place in real-time between two or more parties. Put simply; a synchronous communication exchange is an interactive, 'live' interchange between people. This is kind of communication, where the discussion happens in real time over a physical meeting or an online meeting on zoom or google meet etc.

Adding empathy, positivity, & personality into prose

It’s easy enough to misinterpret sarcasm or dry humor in messages from our spouses, partners, or close friends. It’s almost a given that similar phrases shared with less familiar colleagues will be misread. And it’s not necessarily the fault of the writer. Research shows that recipients of written media like email or text chat are more likely to suffer from a “negativity effect,” meaning the lack of emotional cues misleads readers to interpret the messages as significantly more negative than the writer intended.

Don’t sacrifice a written tone that’s warm and personable for something more businesslike unless the situation (or team of lawyers) calls for it. At the same time, assume a positive intent when reading messages from others. They may not be aware that their “just the facts” communication is coming off as cold and calculated. So warm it up for them as you read it, and when in doubt, assume the best.

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