Shantel's Blog

• Active listening is important because it helps to create new ways to approach issues in all aspects of our lives.

• It also helps to diffuse emotional situations in the work place

• Miscommunication can be very costly in the workplace and active listening can help to prevent those costly errors.

• No one enjoys working in a toxic environment, so active listening can help to create a positive one.

If we want to do and be better in the workplace, we should strive to be an active listener because it helps us to understand ourselves and others better. We then become more approachable to others and it helps to the work environment to flow more easily and positively.

• You can encourage and motivate others through active listening, which in return will help them to reach their potentials: Listening to others will help you to understand what is going on a wider based. You get to understand them as a person and what they may want or need from you, and this will help to save resources as well as time.

• Effective listening helps to build trust amongst employees: Active listening tends to create a sense of trust in a speaker’s mind. Your body language such as, making eye contact, and your facial expression most often helps to boost the speaker’s confidence. Active listening plus the right body language can spark empathy which often sparks trust in one’s mind.

• Listening proactively helps to lessen stress: Employees are usually stressed out at work because of miscommunication and misunderstanding, so effective listening helps to give a better and complete understanding of what it is that everyone is trying to say. Active listening helps to get the most out of a conversation and can help to boost your mood. •

• With proper listening skills, it will help to enhance productivity : When an employer is yelling at their employees for instance, less work gets done because employees becomes distressed and resentful. When the employer fails to listen to their employees, there is always a risk of losing those employees because they feel displeasure and tend to find work elsewhere. However, proper listening helps both the employer and the employees to be patient and attentive and gives more clarity on what needs to be done. •

• Active and effective listening helps to better relationships: Relationships need patience, so does effective and active listening. Trustworthy relationships are indispensable in today’s workplace. When you patiently listen to someone, that person is bound to open their heart to you because you are easy to talk to.

Communication is an important key asset in all aspects of our lives and often times when we speak to others, we tend to be misinterpret or misunderstood. So it is in the workplace where we work with people from many different cultures. Others may not have heard what we had said and they may not ask for clarification, which then cause confusion and conflict in workplace.

Communication is also very important in any workplace so that the company can work effieciently and be productive on a daily basis.

Active listening can help you and your work environment to be more productive and attentive to the things that matters. It helps you to understand others, situations and the environment before responding to it.

We can improve our active listening skills by following these simple step:

•  Pay attention – you need to give the speaker your full attention and remove all distraction.  
• Do not interrupt – do not interrupt the speaker as often times they lose their train of thoughts or they feel as if you do not respect them which may cause them to shut down.
•   Seek to understand – ask questions for clarification and omit all misunderstandings.
• Take notes – you do not need to write down word for word of what the speaker is saying, but writing key points will help you to better understand the speaker and can clarify what they are saying.
•  Use body language –  to show the speaker that you are listening, you should make eye contact, use facial expression to match the tone of the conversation and nod occasionally.
• Respond appropriately – use the right tone when responding to the speaker, connect to them and show that you were listening.