There is little doubt that listening makes up a significant portion of the communication events we participate in on a daily basis. According to the International Listening Association, we spend 70% of our day in communication and 45% of that time is spent listening. Of the listening, only a small portion is retained.
In this post, you will be introduced to the role of listening in the communication process.
Let’s begin with the basics.
Hearing v. Listening
• You hear with your ears, but listening involves your intellectual, psychological and physical powers.
• Many people think listening is easy because the physical act of hearing has been confused with the more complex process of listening.
• Listening is not a passive, but an active skill that must be learned and practiced.
Listening errors & ineffectiveness
• Employees spend about 40 percent of their day listening, but research shows that their listening effectiveness is only about 25 percent.
• Workers listening to instructions or presentations hear about 40 percent, understand 25 percent and, after a few days, remember only 5 percent of the information given. This low level of effectiveness costs companies lost time and money.
To become an effective listener, you need to overcome several external and internal barriers to listening.
But what are the barriers?
In human communication, four types of noise are identified. Noise is any interference with the message being delivered as intended. Listening barriers presented in this unit usually fall into these general categories.
- Physical Noise: Environmental noise that either causes a distraction or actually interferes with the hearing of the message: crowd noise; loud music; people talking; noisy machinery; television; etc.
- Physiological: Physical impairments such as hearing loss or articulation problems.
- Psychological: Mental interference brought to the communication event in the form of biases; cultural prejudices; lack of interest or motivation; boredom; extreme emotions; and other personal problems that cannot be set aside. The most damaging internal factor is our own brain. Scientific research shows that we can think about four times faster than we can speak, which adds up to about 125 spoken words to every 500 we think.
- Semantic: Interference caused by differences in meaning systems; language or dialectical differences; overly complex terms; jargon; overly ambiguous or abstract terms.
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