The ability to listen is one of the most important skills you can leverage as a leader and manager. Not only does this ensure that your employees are heard, but it broadens your perspective too. There are four types of listening that you should master.
Vacation is that time of the year when you finally relax and disconnect from daily stress. And most people can’t wait for it! However, some can’t really afford it either due to a lack of money or time. While workers in Europe are entitled to up to 30 days of paid vacation time every year, in the U.S. companies are totally free to choose whether they want to give their workforce any paid vacation at all.
Look around at any airport and you’ll see people surrounding outlets, sitting on their laptops and phones. According to the State of the Remote Job Marketplace report, 43 percent of the workforce works remotely at least some of the time. A major perk of distributed work is the ability to be traveling while on the clock.
Most business communication is done in writing, usually via email and chat messages. According to data from Radicati, there are about 124.5 billion business emails sent and received each day. Writing skills are important.
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.
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.
