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.
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.
Communication in the workplace is essential for the success of any company. Most than anyone else, managers and team leaders should master the art of communication, and be able to engage both their superiors and their underlings into meaningful dialogue. In this article we have a few strategies that will enable you to refine your communication skills at work.
Email and instant messaging have been the foundation of business communication for many decades. Email is the revolutionary medium that moved communication from paper and telephone into the digital environment. The world as we know it now wouldn’t have been possible without this simple, yet effective method of communication. As for instant messaging, even though at first it was used more for personal matters, nowadays an enormous part of business communication takes place on chat.
One of the most basic necessities of any workplace is proper communication. In today’s world that runs on a hectic schedule, where every productive minute counts, the ability to instantly communicate has been a boon for the global work scenario. However, even in our fast-paced lives, writing etiquette can sometimes make all the difference between successful and unsuccessful communication. Let’s find out how chat and email etiquette can enhance our written communication and get us where we want.
![Your Inbox Just Cost You Ten IQ Points [Infographic]](https://blog.4psa.com/wp-content/uploads/81092.jpg)
Did you know that fielding email affects your brain (and even your IQ) much in the same way missing a night’s sleep would? Or that the holy trinity of time wasters – email, meetings, and interruptions – are costing the United States of America tens of billions of dollars annually?