Critical for Employee Engagement …

Listening is one of the most respectful and powerful things you can do for people. Managers are in a position of advocating for others. Listening is a skill rarely taught, yet of considerable value in the workplace. There has to be the right setting or environment for effective listening. People generally want to be heard. When you listen to understand, you can show empathy, you can show you care, more importantly you can offer support for an employee. Excellent managers of people have a common trait of knowing how and wanting to listen. Effective listening means giving people a chance to be heard, by not interrupting, by asking probing questions, by not being quick to judge, by creating opportunities to listen to people.

Many employees are asking ‘why’ type questions. In most cases they even know the answer to the ‘why’ questions. They just want validation that their observations are correct and they want to know if what they plan to do about it is in fact proper. Purposeful listening allows us to better understand a person’s skills set, their decision making style, their readiness to make decisions, sometimes the same decisions they should already be making but perhaps don’t know what an incorrect decision means in terms of consequences. When there is an absence of meaningful dialogue between an employee and their manager it often is all about listening and most of the time has to do with the manager not listening, not wanting to listen or not knowing how to listen.

Dialogue means the regular occurrence of talking about things pertaining to work, not just things that need an answer, or conversations that end with action plans. A dialogue may be about what a person sees as useful or not in terms of company process, it may be about their fears, motivations, viewpoints, etc. Managers who do not dialogue with their employees do not know their employees well enough, and in many cases employee engagement suffers and quite often these same employees end up leaving their company for greener pastures so to speak. The worst case scenario is when a Manager ‘appears’ to be listening, and then does not follow-up or act on the employee’s concerns. A similar situation exists when employees refuse to complete an employee survey because their reasoning is they have already said what they wanted to say in previous surveys and nothing was done about it, so why waste time if the company’s actions show they are not in fact listening?

The #1 reason  by far , confirmed in numerous research studies of ‘why employees leave an organization’ is overwhelmingly directly related to the relationship they have with their manager. If, Managers do not take the time to really listen to employees, they shouldn’t be a manager of people, period.  Managers must get to really know their direct report employees, especially their goals, their stressors, what excites them and how they define success. Managers must be able to identify what is meaningful to their employees. Knowing your employee’s spouses name or their children’s ages is not enough, Managers need to understand their employees, know their dreams, disappointments, goals, motivators, fears, and the activities that build or drain their energy.

Effective management and leadership require that Managers understand their employee’s perspectives & their hopes and dreams and that Managers present them with challenges that leads them in the direction they want to be moving anyways. A true gift managers can give employees is to define in advance what exceptional or above average job performance looks like.  You can only do this by purposeful listening.

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Our website is built on the premise that if you truly see the value and want to manage people professionally, using our tools and information, you will see increased employee engagement levels over time, a win for everyone!