What is active listening and why do you need it in the workplace?

Are you looking to develop soft skills for your career? Here at Phoenix TS, we offer a wide range of online instructor-led training courses to help you develop the soft skills you need to strengthen your career prospects. Active listening is just one of the many certifications and training courses that we offer. But what is active listening and how can it benefit the workplace?

What is active listening?

Active listening is a soft skill that revolves around actively listening and taking in information before responding to it appropriately. However, active listening is a communication skill that goes further than simply listening to others – it involves processing and thinking actively about the information you’re hearing and deriving solutions or opinions on the information presented to you. Active listening is a skill that enables you to deeply understand the underlying message or the central focus of communication.

Why is active listening a valuable soft skill for the workplace?

Research shows us that on average, people spend somewhere between 70% and 80% of their day engaged in communication, meaning that just over 50% of their time is spent listening to others. Because of these figures alone, active listening is an extremely valuable communication soft skill for employees to use across the workplace. Here are just some of the reasons why active listening is such a valuable skill to strengthen:

Establishes positive workplace relationships between colleagues

Active listening allows colleagues to have meaningful and informative conversations within the workplace. Building these kinds of positive relationships with active listening increases the level of positive rapport and trust between employees. This soft skill helps to keep employees engaged throughout their interactions with each other, meaning that communication, on the whole, is more effective.

Minimizes the occurrence of misunderstandings

Developing your active listening skills can have a positive impact on the wider workplace environment by minimizing the occurrence of misunderstandings. Misunderstandings across the workplace can lead to disruption and a lack of productivity, which is what makes active listening such a valuable skill. You can easily combat misunderstandings with active listening by ensuring that everyone is fully engaged in conversation and the happenings of the workplace.

Increases productivity by enhancing collaboration

Active listening also boosts general workplace productivity by enhancing collaboration between colleagues. Collaboration is highly valued across the workplace for enabling employees to complete tasks at a faster rate and of a higher quality due to various minds working together. Active listening skills have an important role in enabling collaboration as colleagues can effectively communicate and understand each other’s approaches and ideas.

Utilize our online instructor-led training services

Are you looking to improve your employees’ active listening skills? Look no further than our high-quality and informative instructor-led Active Listening online course, which is specifically devoted to strengthening listening skills. Our course focuses on strengthening listening to better develop relationships, paraphrase important conversations and ask valuable questions whilst improving engagement.

For more information about our excellent online active listening course, or to browse our other available soft skills courses, you can contact a member of our team at Phoenix TS today.