Americans could use a vacation and unplugging from the digital world. Recent data shows that an estimated 53 percent of Americans continue to work over the weekend, 52 percent outside of designated office hours, and 54 percent still work even if they call in sick, according to Deloitte.
Lack of employee motivation costs companies billions every year. Low motivation equals low productivity, poor results and low income. Studies show that 48% of employees don’t really like their jobs, while 80% feel stressed and only 30% feel engaged and inspired. At the same time, 18% of US employees completely hate their jobs.
We’ve explored the importance of listening in this series, and now it’s time to talk about some simple and practical strategies for honing your listening skills. It’s especially important for leaders, who have employees to manage and guide. Because simply standing in the room while someone talks is not enough.
No one can deny the enormous benefits brought by digital communication. However, being able to communicate with people without actually seeing or hearing them has downsides too. We lose the social cues offered by nonverbal communication.
Listening is critical to your workday and poor listening skills can ruin it. Top executives for a Chicago manufacturing plant were asked to survey the role of listening in their plant. After hearing a seminar on listening, Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens explain in their Harvard Business Review article, that one of the most common responses was:
“Frankly, I had never thought of listening as an important subject by itself. But now that I am aware of it, I think that perhaps 80 percent of my work depends on my listening to someone, or on someone else listening to me.”
This is true for nearly anyone who works with other people. Having good listening skills is critical to avoiding miscommunication and staying connected with other team members and managers.
Most adults spend up to 11 hours per day digitally connected one way or another. We use screens for work, for fun, for shopping – basically our entire lives revolve around a screen. While some people don’t see that as a problem, 1 in 5 people have taken a digital detox, and 7 in 10 people are trying to limit their screen time.
Effective listening is a critical part of communicating—you can’t have one without the other. No matter where your position lies in the chain of command. Both managers and entry level employees alike need to hear feedback, take direction and understand the needs of the people around them.
Productivity is a concept used to describe effectiveness given by the results we get from the amount of work we put into something. Maximum productivity is the inversely proportional relationship between the amount of effort and the quality of the results. So, for optimizing work and ultimately maximizing productivity, we need to get the best results out of minimum effort.
In this day and age, millennial-run startups prefer a more horizontal type of organizational structure. People are more and more inclined towards blurring the lines between formal and casual. However, formal communication hasn’t totally lost its power. There are still instances in which this type of communication is needed. In such cases, it can make all the difference between order and chaos at work.
In this article we are going to discuss the main advantages of formal communication, and how we can overcome its disadvantages.
Inappropriate behavior can happen in any company. As a boss or manager, it falls under your jurisdiction to manage such situations, and fast. When left unchecked, unsuitable actions can have serious impact on other employee’s performance as well as the office environment as a whole.
