Good Listening Skills Are Very Important in the Workplace

Imagine for a second that you’re talking with one of your employees about a new assignment. You give them specific directions and a deadline for when the assignment needs to be completed. Your employee nods, says “OK” and walks away to go get the job done.

The next thing you know, the deadline hits and the employee doesn’t have the work done. They misinterpreted what you said and thought it was due a week from the day it was actually due. Now you’re in a jam because two other employees were relying on this employee to get the project finished on time.

Or maybe the employee does turn the assignment in on time, but it’s not what was expected of them.

Sound familiar? Poor listening can lead to many problems in the workplace, including:

• Dissatisfied customers
• Missed deadlines
• Poor morale among coworkers
• Assignments completed incorrectly

Good communication in the workplace is one of the most important skills. And the basis of good communication is good listening skills. In fact, the two go hand-in-hand; you really can’t have one without the other.

What Are Good Listening Skills?
Being a good listener isn’t very hard, it just requires you to pay attention to what’s being said and make sure you understood what you heard. 

One of the things I’ve learned during my career is that “Communication is a matter of what’s heard rather than what is said.” And I absolutely agree with this because it’s easy for things to be misinterpreted. 

Here are two techniques for developing good listening skills: 

• Concentrate on the Person Speaking—In order to do this, you need to eliminate all distractions around you. There are two kinds of distractions, internal distractions—such as the voice in your head that’s saying “Oh goodness, I need to pick up my kids and take them to soccer practice and I need to stop at the grocery store and, oh, I forgot to call back my client; I need to do that as well”—and external distractions—such as someone walking by your desk.
  
  Some people are very good at blocking out distractions, but for those who aren’t, you can help avoid distractions by simply closing an office door or stepping into a conference room. Or you might say, “I’m sorry, this isn’t a good time, can we set up another time to talk?” when you’re too busy to really listen well.
  
  
• Be a Good Interpreter—Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve said (or someone has said to you), “You never listen to me,” or “That’s not what I said?” Good listeners hear the message and interpret it correctly, even if the messenger is not really skilled at delivering the message. To be a good interpreter, you can summarize what you heard and check with the speaker to be sure you heard correctly. Asking questions or getting clarification also helps you interpret the message more accurately.
  
  For example, you could clarify something that was just said to you by asking: “Did you mean this Tuesday or a week from Tuesday?”

In my next Insight, I’ll explain how to be a better listener and how you can train employees to have good listening skills as well.

Poor listening can lead to many problems in the workplace.