Workplace listening

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Workplace listening is a type of active listening that is generally employed in a professional environment. Listening skills are imperative for career success, organizational effectiveness, and worker satisfaction. Workplace listening includes understanding the listening process (i.e. perception, interpretation, evaluation, and action) and its barriers that hamper the flow of that process. Like other skills, there are specific techniques for improving workplace listening effectiveness. Moreover, it is imperative to become aware of the role of nonverbal communication in communicating in the workplace, as understanding messages wholly entails more than simple verbal messages.

Active listening is a technique that is used in counseling, training, and solving disputes or conflicts. It requires that the listener fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said. This is opposed to reflective listening where the listener repeats back to the speaker what they have just heard to confirm understanding of both parties. Empathic listening is about giving people an outlet for their emotions before being able to be more open, which is sharing experiences and being able to accept new perspectives on the troubled topic that is the reason of emotional suffering. Listening skills may establish flow rather than closed mindedness, negative emotions include stress, anger and frustration.

Organizational effectiveness is the concept of how effective an organization is in achieving the outcomes the organization intends to produce. Organizational Effectiveness groups in organizations directly concern themselves with several key areas. They are talent management, leadership development, organization design and structure, design of measurements and scorecards, implementation of change and transformation, deploying smart processes and smart technology to manage the firms' human capital and the formulation of the broader Human Resources agenda. If an organization has practices and programs in the areas above, the OE group does many or all of the following roles

Nonverbal communication process of communication through sending and receiving wordless (mostly visual) cues between people

Nonverbal communication (NVC) is the nonlinguistic transmission of information through visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic (physical) channels.

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The process of informational listening focuses on the ability of an individual to understand a speaker's message. It is a huge part of everyday life, and failing to understand the concept of informational listening can be very detrimental to one's quality of life and to their contribution to society. Much of the listening people engage in on a regular basis falls under the blanket of listening for information. In the office, people listen to their superiors for instructions about what they are to do. At school, students listen to teachers for information that they are expected to understand for quizzes and tests. In all areas of life, informational listening plays a huge role in human communication.

Reflective listening is a communication strategy involving two key steps: seeking to understand a speaker's idea, then offering the idea back to the speaker, to confirm the idea has been understood correctly. It attempts to "reconstruct what the client is thinking and feeling and to relay this understanding back to the client". Reflective listening is a more specific strategy than the more general methods of active listening. It arose from Carl Rogers' school of client-centered therapy in counseling theory. Empathy is at the center of Rogers' approach.

Appreciative listening is a type of listening behavior where the listener seeks certain information which they will appreciate, for example that which helps meet his/her needs and goals. One uses appreciative listening when listening to good music, poetry or maybe even the stirring words of a great leader.

Related Research Articles

Communication is the act of conveying meanings from one entity or group to another through the use of mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic rules.

Cross-cultural communication

Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavor to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field of study.

Listening

According to Oxford Dictionary, Listening is to give your attention to sound or action.When listening, you are hearing what others are saying, and trying to understand what it means. The act of listening involves complex affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes. Affective processes include the motivation to listen to others; cognitive processes include attending to, understanding, receiving, and interpreting content and relational messages; and behavioral processes include responding to others with verbal and nonverbal feedback.

A skill is the ability to carry out a task with determined results often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can often be divided into domain-general and domain-specific skills. For example, in the domain of work, some general skills would include time management, teamwork and leadership, self-motivation and others, whereas domain-specific skills would be used only for a certain job. Skill usually requires certain environmental stimuli and situations to assess the level of skill being shown and used.

Body language is a type of nonverbal communication in which physical behaviors, as opposed to words, are used to express or convey information. Such behavior includes facial expressions, body posture, gestures, eye movement, touch and the use of space. Body language exists in both animals and humans, but this article focuses on interpretations of human body language. It is also known as kinesics.

Nonviolent Communication communication process developed by Marshall Rosenberg

Nonviolent Communication is an approach to nonviolent living developed by Marshall Rosenberg beginning in the 1960s.

Intercultural communication is a discipline that studies communication across different cultures and social groups, or how culture affects communication. It describes the wide range of communication processes and problems that naturally appear within an organization or social context made up of individuals from different religious, social, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. In this sense it seeks to understand how people from different countries and cultures act, communicate and perceive the world around them. Many people in intercultural business communication argue that culture determines how individuals encode messages, what medium they choose for transmitting them, and the way messages are interpreted.
With regard to intercultural communication proper, it studies situations where people from different cultural backgrounds interact. Aside from language, intercultural communication focuses on social attributes, thought patterns, and the cultures of different groups of people. It also involves understanding the different cultures, languages and customs of people from other countries. Intercultural communication plays a role in social sciences such as anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, psychology and communication studies. Intercultural communication is also referred to as the base for international businesses. Several cross-cultural service providers assist with the development of intercultural communication skills. Research is a major part of the development of intercultural communication skills.

Internal communications

Internal communications (IC) is the function responsible for effective communications among participants within an organization. The scope of the function varies by organization and practitioner, from producing and delivering messages and campaigns on behalf of management, to facilitating two-way dialogue and developing the communication skills of the organization's participants.

Conflict management is the process of limiting the negative aspects of conflict while increasing the positive aspects of conflict. The aim of conflict management is to enhance learning and group outcomes, including effectiveness or performance in an organizational setting. Properly managed conflict can improve group outcomes.

Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) is a parent education program based on the Gordon Model by Thomas Gordon. Dr. Gordon taught the first P.E.T. course in 1962 and the courses proved to be so popular with parents that he began training instructors throughout the United States to teach it in their communities. Over the next several years, the course spread to all 50 states. In 1970, Dr. Gordon wrote the Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) book which gave many more parents access to this new parenting philosophy. As a result, people in many parts of the world became interested in making the course available in their countries. The book became a best-seller and was updated in 2000 revised book.

Thomas Gordon (psychologist) American psychologist

Thomas Gordon was an American clinical psychologist and colleague of Carl Rogers. He is widely recognized as a pioneer in teaching communication skills and conflict resolution methods to parents, teachers, leaders, women, youth and salespeople. The model he developed came to known as the Gordon Model or the Gordon Method, a complete and integrated system for building and maintaining effective relationships.

Health communication is the study and practice of communicating promotional health information, such as in public health campaigns, health education, and between doctor and patient. The purpose of disseminating health information is to influence personal health choices by improving health literacy.

W. Charles Redding is credited as being the "father" of organizational communication. Redding played a significant role in both the creation and study of the field of Organizational Communication. Redding described communication as "referring to the behaviors of human beings, or the artifacts created by human beings, which result in messages being received by one or more persons."

People skills are patterns of behavior and behavioral interactions. Among people, it is an umbrella term for skills under three related set of abilities: personal effectiveness, interaction skills, and intercession skills. This is an area of exploration about how a person behaves and how they are perceived irrespective of their thinking and feeling. It is further elaborated as dynamics between personal ecology and its function with other people's personality styles in numerous environments. British dictionary definition is "the ability to communicate effectively with people in a friendly way, especially in business" or personal effectiveness skills. In business it is a connection among people in a humane level to achieve productivity.

Interpersonal communication exchange of information between two or more people who are interdependent

Interpersonal communication is an exchange of information between two or more people. It is also an area of study and research that seeks to understand how humans use verbal and nonverbal cues to accomplish a number of personal and relational goals. Generally, interpersonal communication research has contributed to at least six distinct categories of inquiry: 1) how humans adjust and adapt their verbal communication and nonverbal communication during face-to-face communication, 2) the processes of message production, 3) how uncertainty influences our behavior and information-management strategies, 4) deceptive communication, 5) relational dialectics, and 6) social interaction that is mediated by technology.

Workplace communication is the process of exchanging information and ideas, both verbal and non-verbal, within an organization. An organization may consist of employees from different parts of the society. These may have different cultures and backgrounds, and can be used to different norms. To unite activities of all employees and restrain from any missed deadline or activity that could affect the company negatively, communication is crucial. Effective workplace communication ensures that all the organizational objectives are achieved. Workplace communication is tremendously important to organizations because it increases productivity and efficiency. Ineffective workplace communication leads to communication gaps between employees, which causes confusion, wastes time, and reduces productivity. Misunderstandings that cause friction between people can be avoided by effective workplace communication.Effective communication, also called open communication, prevents barriers from forming among individuals within companies that might impede progress in striving to reach a common goal. For businesses to function as desired, managers and lower-level employees must be able to interact clearly and effectively with each other through verbal communication and non-verbal communication to achieve specific business goals. Effective communication with clients plays a vital role in development of an organization and success of any business. When communicating, nonverbal communication must also be taken into consideration. How a person delivers a message has a lot of influence on the meaning of this one.

Pseudolistening

Pseudo-listening is a type of non-listening that consists of appearing attentive in conversation while actually ignoring or only partially listening to the other speaker. The intent of pseudo-listening is not to listen, but to cater to some other personal need of the listener. The word pseudo-listening is a compound word composed of the individual words pseudo, and listening. An example of pseudo-listening is trying to multitask by talking on the phone while watching television or completing work. Pseudo-listening is the most ineffective way to communicate because after the conversation one will not have retained much of the information that was said.

In 1960, David Berlo expanded Shannon and Weaver's linear model of communication and created the Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver (SMCR) Model of Communication, which separated the model into clear parts and has been expanded upon by other scholars. Berlo described factors affecting the individual components in the communication making the communication more efficient.

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