Active listening and how to improve your skills

Communication is key in any workplace, but if you aren’t engaging your active listening skills then you likely aren’t growing your professional relationships in the workplace.

Listening is an important, basic skill for everyone to be utilising in their day-to-day, but are you really hearing what is being said?

During a conversation with someone, active listening ensures that you are effectively understanding and communicating with others, and this in turn can grow trust and stronger relationships among employees.

So if you have poor active listening skills, you need to work on improving this technique to benefit yourself, the person you are talking to, and your whole organisation’s productivity.

What is active listening?

Active listening is a technique you can use in your workplace to build trust with your coworkers and encourage a supportive and understanding environment – all through listening to people in a specific way.

Using active listening means:

• You are showing the person that you are speaking to that you are fully engaged in the conversation
• You are listening beyond the conversation, taking into account their body language and other social cues
• You are absorbing what is said and responding in a way that shows there is mutual understanding

It may sound simple. But it can be harder than you think to do active listening!

Most people don’t realise that just because you are hearing a conversation doesn’t mean you are actually taking it all in.

Active listening is all about seeking to understand what is being communicated by another person, processing whatever that message is, and being able to respond in an appropriate and constructive way.

The overarching purpose of active listening is to let the person you are talking to know that their opinion is valid, important, and understood, as well as ensuring you are walking away with a fully formed understanding of the conversation. 

This skill can be really beneficial in the case where you need to have a difficult conversation with an employee. You can learn more about this in our article, ‘Having difficult conversations at work‘.

Why is it important in the workplace?

Having good communication skills is incredibly important to well-functioning teams and departments in a business.

Engaging in active listening can have so many positive benefits in the workplace.

It can:

• Reduce miscommunications or misunderstandings
• Result in team or project problem-solving
• Assist with mediating conflicts in the workplace 

Showing your colleague or employee that you have an open mind and are willing to understand their point of view can make a huge difference – as it lets them know that themselves and their opinion are valued and matter.

In turn, this can also lead to an improved culture and work environment for every person within the organisation.

Your active listening skills can also foster really important relationships with your colleagues and employees, whether that be on a personal or professional basis.

What is the opposite of active listening? Don’t be caught passive listening

If you don’t use active listening, then you may be utilising its more dreary cousin – passive listening. 

Using passive listening means you may not get all the information you need from a person and this can also result in a breakdown in trust and openness between yourself and the individual you are talking to.

You should look at passively listening as a person who may be physically in a conversation, but is not ‘present’ in the conversation.

However, never fear, just because you are passive listening doesn’t mean you are doing it on purpose, it could be because you are tired or you have a lot of tasks on your plate.

But you should try to avoid passive listening because it is more than likely you will miss out on important social cues that are vital for a cohesive work environment.

Below are a few points that would be considered passive listening:

• You show boredom or disinterest in what the person is saying
• The conversation is one way, so you don’t ask for any more clarity or to further your understanding of a situation
• Become distracted outside of the conversation because you are thinking about other things
• Your body language is not inviting or supportive, including yawning, looking around the room, not keeping eye contact, etc
• Showing a lack of interest which is putting the person off talking to you

If you can reduce your passive listening and move towards a more active listening role, it will lead to better outcomes for everyone involved.

Improving your active listening skills

Like any skill, practising your active listening is key. This means you should understand what you need to do to become better at conversations with your colleagues or employees.

Below are tips on how to improve your active listening:

• Tip 1: Your body language:
  Are you facing the speaker and maintaining eye contact? This can let them know that you are paying attention to the conversation. You should be attentive in the conversation but also relaxed, you don’t want to stress out the person if you have an expression on your face that may look like anger or disappointment.
• Tip 2: Be open-minded when listening to the person:
  You should be listening to understand what they are saying, not closing off that line of communication. If you reject what the employee says, it can result in the person closing themself off.
• Tip 3: Avoid interrupting:
  It can be hard to stop yourself from interrupting someone when you have questions you want to be answered. But wait for a pause in conversation or jot down your questions for when they have finished – rather than interrupting their train of thought.
• Tip 4: Ask the right questions:
  Anything you ask of the person should be to clarify and increase your understanding of the situation or topic. The questions you ask should be open-ended questions, not close-ended questions – as close-ended questions result in yes/no answers. This means the questions you ask gives the person the opportunity to add more context or information where they see fit.
• Tip 5: Empathise and acknowledge your worker:
  Make sure to acknowledge what a person has said to you. Any conversation, situation, idea, or topic should be validated so it encourages the staffer to approach you again for conversations in the future.
• Tip 6: Watch out for non-verbal cues:
  While a person may have the opportunity to say something, you may find that they seem to be holding themselves back. Understanding non-verbal cues can notify you to ask follow-up questions to make sure a person has gotten everything off their chest. The non-verbal clues you may notice could include different facial expressions, changes in tone of voice and body language. These clues can all be good indicators of if the person feels heard or still has more to say.

You may also find it helpful to have important conversations in places that don’t have distractions in the background, so you can engage your active listening skills to the fullest.

Using the above tips can ensure that you listen effectively to your colleagues and staff, decode what is being said to you, and improve the overall communication and environment within your workplace.