Effective listening at work breeds efficient delegation of duties. If you are a proactive listener you must have reaped many rewards at work.

Do you remember the good old school days? Do you remember how many times in class your teacher told: “Listen to me!”  And try to remember how much you have reaped the benefits every time you listened to your teacher.

There are numerous benefits of effective listening. And in workplace active listening is imperative.

No doubt it is the reason behind so many soft skills training labs and institutes offer these days, courses on effective listening.

But if you ask me in a nutshell what is effective listening, I can offer you with only one answer.

Effective listening is nothing but simply having the patience, intention, and concentration to listen to a speaker without being tempted to add comments every time in between or at the end of the speech.

If you want to understand more about effective listening, you may click here.

Some researchers have gone to the extent that impactful communication should follow the 80-20 principle. That is, listen 80% and talk 20%.

So what do you think? What may be the obvious benefits of effective listening? See, if you agree with what I write below!

1. Effective Listening breeds Trust:

Effective listening breeds trust among employees, superiors, colleagues, subordinates and with every stakeholder.

There are two basic ingredients to plant trust in the heart of others. Those are body language and active listening.

Body languages like maintaining eye contact, leaning forward, and sitting in an open position are few things to follow while you are listening to someone. These mannerisms boost confidence in the speaker’s mind.

Then active listening creates a sense of trust in the speaker’s mind.

Right body language + Active listening = Empathy.

And any listener who shows proper empathy to speaker breeds trusts in the mind.

2. Effective Listening forges better Relationship:

Do you remember when you first took part in any debate competition? How you were in a race to stomp other’s comments!

But this way you can never work as a cohesive team. For a cohesive team, you need to forge a genuine relationship. Good relationships come from effective listening in conversations.

If you are in a race to put only your views in a fast forward manner, you kill the bonding in relationships.

Most of the time we waste too much energy as we impatiently wait when the speaker shall give us a chance to speak, frantically guessing out what shall be our next befitting reply.

This habit of forecasting kills a relationship.  Relationships need patience. So does the effective listening. When you listen to someone patiently, the person is bound to open his heart. And in today’s workplace, trustworthy relationships are invaluable.

Customer delights can only be achieved via cementing genuine relationships with them.

3. Productivity gets enhanced:

Proper listening skills at workplace enhance Productivity.

Any boss who only shouts at employees, or any employee who is too casual or impatient at work – can any of them excel at the workplace? I fell you agree with me the answer is a definitive “no”!

Proper listening, which means being patient while others are saying something, concentrating on their body language and speech and modulation of voice, as well as re-confirming every word they speak, are essential for clarity in conversation at the workplace.

For managers and employees alike it is important to read in between the lines. Thus how someone speaks is more important than what he/she speaks.

As you learn the traits of effective listening you are able to carry out work more unambiguously. You have better clarity about what you have to do.

4.  Less stress at workstations:

Proactive listening lessens the stress of your life. You are not bugged with imaginary emotions because now you know; you are not doing any guesswork.

Many a workplace chaos happens because of misunderstandings, half-baked communications.

Effective listening gives a complete understanding of what everybody is trying to say, gives a lot more transparent picture of the whole scenario, cool down and create fruitful solutions.

As a result, you carry less stress across workstations.

For an intro into how you can be an effective listener, you may click here.  Are you in sync with what we have just told? Please keep posting your valuable comments below in the comment box.

Sayak

Sayak takes care of both recruitments and assessment projects of The HR Monks team. He loves helping people finding their dream job.

He started his journey in career leaving the shores of Waiting for Godot and found The HR Monks a better place, where he can change the lives of people by helping them achieve their dreams.

He has been to quite a fewer place across India and loves to travel. He loves two books, in particular, one Siddhartha by Herman Hesse and the other The Shift by Dr. Wayne Dyer.