2011

SHARDA UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY

ESSENTIALS OF PUBLIC SPEAKING

LISTENING AT WORKPLACE

SUBMITTED TO:

SUMIT BHARDWAJ
1/1/20 11

LISTENING AT WORKPLACE

Group Members :
AAKANKSHA RASTOGI ( 090101001) ALOK SINGH ( 090101 ASHWANI SINGH (090101 KANAV CHADHA (090101 KUNAL JINDAL (090101 HIMIKA RANA (090101 HIMANSHU SHUBHANI (090101 HARRINDER KUMAR (090101 HEMLATA (090101 GIRISH PRASHAD (090101

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We take immense pleasure to express our sincere gratitude to our Essentials Of Public Speaking Professor Mr. Sumit Bharadwaj , who has an attitude and the substance of a Genius. We were privileged to experience a sustained enthusiastic and involved interest from his side. This fueled our enthusiasm even further and encouraged us to understand the concepts of Public Speaking. His able guidance and useful suggestions, helped us in completing the project work, in time. We would also like to express our heartfelt thanks to our beloved parents for their blessings, our friends/classmates for their help and wishes for the successful completion of this project. Last but not the least we would like to thanks the almighty for guiding us.

CONTENTS
1. Introduction

2. Types Of Listening

3. Active listening

4. Types of work place listening

5. Why You Need Good Listening Skills

6. Barriers to Listening

7. How to listen well

8. Bibliography

INTRODUCTION
In the work place environment, there are many factors that help determine an organization's ability and skill in maintaining the stability and organization among its employees/members. One of these factors includes attaining an organizational communication process through effective communication skills. Communication is the sharing of ideas and information. It is primarily in oral or written form but communication is much more than that. It is exchanging of information, signals, or messages as by talk, gestures, or writing. In communication, listening is regarded as the most important element. Work-place communication that results in a misunderstanding is often the result of poor listening habits. Establishing yourself as a leader (no matter your position) and a good communicator is more than just what you say and how you say it-it is understanding when you need to be quiet and pay attention to what others are saying. Short attention spans, numerous distractions, prejudging and well, pitiful manners are just a few reasons why you and your co-workers may be poor listeners. The best communicators know the power of conscious listening. Listening well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as talking well. This quote by John Marshall makes it all

the more clear how important being a good listener is than just being someone used to talking and being heard. Hearing a conversation is quite natural, but to listen intensely and grasp the essence of the conversation the way the speaker intended you to, is what effective listening is all about. This is highly beneficial to you as well as people around. There is a process involved in Listening, played by the listener, speaker, message and visuals. Speakers, for instance, pre-judge their listeners. So they adapt a way of speech that they think will best suit so that their listeners could comprehend the meaning of their message according to them and could get exacly what they are saying. The Complete listening takes place in four steps: Perception It is the immediate or intuitive recognition of what speaker is saying by the listener.The process by which an organism attains awareness or understanding of its environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. Interpretation- It involves interpreting and decoding heard messages. Evaluation- Evaluation involves separating facts from opinions objectively. We often listen with prejudices and biases. This, primarily, is what hampers effective listening. Effective listening is an important part of building trust and strengthening business relationship, which in turn are inevitable ingredients of building empires.

Action- Action involves retaining ,reacting, or providing feedback. At work-place there are many forms of messages which are interacted between the people. These messages may be between officers, officers and customers , officers and subordinates. Work-messages are very efficient and important for any organisation which are well-utilized in the workplace. These messages allow co-workers to collaborate easily without having to leave their cubicle or office. It is important to do so in a professional manner to avoid any misunderstandings or blunders. These messages are: Straight forward instructions given by officers to their subordinates. They may be any order about any consignment to complete the work before deadline. May be about the format to be followed to complete a certain job. It may be a complicated conversation, such as an obtuse interaction between several people, involves officers ,customers. It may be any discussion between colleagues about any project. To communicate well, one must master listening process.

TYPES OF LISTENING
1. Discriminative Listening This is the most basic type of listening, whereby the difference between the sounds is identified. Unless the differences between the sounds is identified, the meaning expressed by such differences cannot be grasped. 2. Comprehension Listening Once we have learnt to discriminate between the different sounds, the next step is to try to comprehend the meaning of these sounds. In order to do this, we require a dictionary of words, along with the rules of grammar and syntax. 3. Evaluative Listening This kind of listening involves making judgments about what the speaker is saying.We listen critically and try to assess what is being said as good, bad, worthy or unworthy. We generally resort to this kind of listening when the other person is trying to persuade us, change .our behavior or convictions. The tendency then is to question what the speaker is trying to say. 4. Appreciative Listening This kind of listening could be in the form of paying selective attention to certain kinds of information which might be relevant to us, or which helps to meet our needs and goals. The tendency is to appreciate such information better. Appreciative listening is also used when listening to good music, poetry or a powerful speech.

5. Empathetic Listening In this type of listening, we try to put ourselves in the other persons place and understand the moods, beliefs, goals and feelings behind the speakers words. It requires excellent discrimination and paying attention to the nuances of emotional signals. It also requires a high degree of sensitivity and tactful probing on the part of the listener. Empathetic listening is most often needed at the workplace, when dealing with customer complaints, employee feedback and problems. A manager doing a performance appraisal with an employee for example, should listen to the employees point of view and understand the real reasons for lack of performance. 6. Therapeutic Listening In this type of listening, the listener goes beyond merely empathizing with the speaker and tries to help him to change or develop in some way. In other words, he plays the role of a therapist, by diagnosing the problem at hand and offering a remedy or solution. It is important in job situations, where managers try to solve the problems of employees. Taking the same example of a manager doing a performance appraisal, the manager should not only understand the employees problems, but should also counsel him, by suggesting what measures he could take to improve his performance in future. 7. Dialogic Listening As the name suggests, this type of listening involves listening and learning through dialogue. This implies that listening is a two way, rather than a one way process. It involves interchange of ideas and information between the speaker and the listener. This type of listening is active listening, whereby the listener continuously seeks clarifications, gives feedback and engages in conversation with the speaker. Another name for this is relational listening, since are relationship is established through the exchange of ideas

ACTIVE LISTENING
Active listening is a structured way of listening and responding to others, focusing attention on the speaker. Suspending one's own frame of reference, suspending judgment and avoiding other internal mental activities are important to fully attend to the speaker. Active listening is a communication technique that requires the listener to understand, interpret, and evaluate what (s)he hears. The ability to listen actively can improve personal relationships through reducing conflicts, strengthening cooperation, and fostering understanding. When interacting, people often are not listening attentively. . They are often distracted, half listening, half thinking about something else. When people are engaged in a conflict, they are often busy formulating a response to what is being said. They assume that they have heard what their opponent is saying many times before, so rather than paying attention, they focus on how they can respond to win the argument. Active listening is a structured form of listening and responding that focuses the attention on the speaker. The listener must take care to attend to the speaker fully, and then repeats, in the listeners own words, what he or she thinks the speaker has said. The listener does not have to agree with the speaker--he or she must simply state what they think the speaker said. This enables the speaker to find out whether the listener really understood. If the listener did not, the speaker can explain some more. listener understood what happened, but can indicate that he or she also understood the speakers psychological response to it.

TYPES OF WORKPLACE LISTENING

1. listening to superiors This includes : hearing instructions assignments tasks explanations of working procedures carefully, by taking concise notes, paraphrasing what you hear, and not interrupting. 2. listening to colleagues & teammates This includes : engaging in critical listening discriminative listening. 3. listening to customers This includes : Organizations that listen to customers and take action increasingly acquire loyal customers which, in turn, yields higher sales. Taking into consideration the customers needs and wants

WHY YOU NEED GOOD LISTENING SKILL

In a word, the better at listening you are, the more productive you will be in your career and more opportunities will come to you. Those who are most skilled at listening are able to better understand work they have been given, as well as what is expected of them. Those who are unable to listen well, on the other hand, are more likely to fail when they are given an assignment, or to turn in work that is of much lower quality than is expected. If you are a good listener, you should find it quite easy to establish positive working relationships with bosses, clients, as well as colleagues. Do you find that you have difficulty getting along with others in your profession, that people quite often avoid you? Then it might have a lot to do with how others perceive your listening skills. If you are perceived as a bad listener, then oftentimes people will try to avoid you altogether rather than spend the energy it requires to communicate complex matters to you. You might then find yourself missing out on a lot of opportunities that would come to you quite readily otherwise. Good listeners are also quite adept at showing support in the work place. They are people who sense when something is going wrong, and then offer to jump right in when they are given the chance. This earns you a lot of respect. Try to be aware of things that are happening in your environment at all times even if they do not directly concern you. Thus good listening techniques help us to show support and enhances the ability to work better in a team-based environment. It provide us the quality to understand and visualise the situations well , we can easily resolve problems with customers , co workers and bosses. We can immediately answer any query and can easily find underlying meanings in what others say.

BARRIERS TO LISTENING
Bias or prejudice: It lead us to the "knowing the answer" barrier, means that you think you already know what the speaker wants to say, before she actually finishes saying it. You might then impatiently cut her off or try to complete the sentence for her. This causes the listener to pre-judge what the speaker is saying a kind of closed-mindedness. A good listener tries to keep an open, receptive mind. He looks for opportunities to stretch his mind when listening, and to acquire new ideas or insights, rather than reinforcing existing points of view. language differences or accents: Language barriers often add misunderstandings in the workplace. When a person speaks little English, he/she can be intimidated and frustrated trying to communicate with English-speaking supervisors or co-workers and visa versa. Workers may act like they know what is being said, but in fact, may not know. In some jobs, this can be dangerous. Noise: Noise is a barrier that prevents people from listening to messages. External noise includes anything that makes it difficult to hear and pay attention to a speaker, such as sirens blaring outside of a window, other people talking and dogs barking. Worry, Fear Or Anger : Listeners may also get distracted by internal noise, which is anything they may be thinking about that prevents them from listening. Relationship problems, a death in the family or worrying about money may create an inner dialogue that makes it impossible to concentrate on what someone else is saying.

Attention Span Lack of attention span: An attention span is the amount of time a person will pay attention to a message before getting distracted. Most people's attention span will accommodate only messages that are short and relatively simple and do not put heavy demands on their ability to concentrate. Watching television can shorten people's attention spans if they engage in channel surfing -- frequently changing channels to find something different to watch. The short length of commercials also has accustomed people to hearing short messages. People also have the tendency to fake attention, so that a speaker does not realize that audience members are not actively listening to the message. This is a habit that many people learn as young schoolchildren, making it easier for their minds to wander during a message because it looks as though they're paying attention.

HOW TO LISTEN WELL

maintain eye contact; don't interrupt the speaker; sit still; nod your head; lean toward the speaker; Feeling rushed can be a significant distraction to effective listening;

repeat instructions and ask appropriate questions when the speaker has finished; In order to ensure that you have understood what has been said, periodically summarise the essence of the discussion; When confusion occurs during the interaction, clarify the matter as soon as possible so that further listening is not compromised; When listening to complicated discussions, consider making notes in a notebook to ensure that you get the critical details;

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. 2. 3. www.google.com www.wikipedia.com www.exforsys.com