Resource Scan — How to Help Staff Engage Better Using Active Listening

 

INTE 6720 Resource Scan

Need

Coming into this upcoming year at my organization, my coworker and I are leading a series of trainings in organizational communication. Though I’ve studied this topic quite a bit in undergrad, there are nuances that I want to cover within my current organization where I think we lack. The topic I would like to cover and take a deep dive in is active listening. We miss so much information being told and/or shared because we are terrible active listeners. We waste numerous time on explaining information more than once because employees aren’t actually listening. This project is going to allow me to do research on active listening and share information out to our organization to hopefully change the way we actively listen.

Search method

For this project, I only used the Auraria Library Database for searching for articles and journals. The keywords I used were:

 

Listening skills, effective listening, active listening

Resources

Fedesco, H. N. (2014). The impact of (in)effective listening on interpersonal interactions. International Journal of Listening, 29(2), 103-106.

 

This was a short article but it was pretty useful for me to use. This article was around an activity on listening and the impact of using listening skills and not using listening skills. The activity involved three groups which were storytellers, active listeners and inactive listeners. The author highlighted how not only was the interactions with those who did not use active listening skills was awkward, and that the side of the room in which they weren’t using listening skills was quieter and even though the students knew what was happening, they still didn’t want to interact with those who demonstrated these skills.

 

Spataro, S. E., & Bloch, J. (2017). “Can you repeat that?” Teaching Active listening in management education. Journal of Management Education, 42(2), 168-198.

 

This article was a good resource to use for designing all types of listening trainings. The authors focused on how difficult it is for people to listen these days, and they gave ideas for designing listening methods and tools. Overall, this is a good article because of the process they use. The started by focusing on the different learning styles and how they directly impact how one may listen.

 

Topornycky, J., & Golparian, S. (2016). Balancing openness and interpretation in active listening. Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 9, 175-184.

 

In this journal article, the authors focus on how listening helps bridge gaps. They use the term openness as way to bridge gaps between disciplines and professions. This is valuable information for me because we have issues with that in our organization. Also, the authors tackle misinterpretation in listening, which can cause someone to stop listening and start trying to decipher.

 

Naidionova, A. V., & Ponomarenko, O. G. (2018). Use of podcasting technology to develop students’ listening skills. Ìnformacìjnì Tehnologì ì Zasobi Navčannâ, 63(1), 177-185.

 

This was a fun article to read because this subject is something I’m really interested in. The authors did a study of 102 students using podcasting to improve listening and teach ESL. Using a technology that is solely based on listening is a good way to really teach listening!

 

Manusov, V., Stofleth, D., Harvey, J. A., & Crowley, J. P. (2018). Conditions and consequences of listening well for interpersonal relationships: Modeling active-empathic listening, social-emotional skills, trait mindfulness, and relational quality. International Journal of Listening, 1-17.

 

I thought this article was interesting because at my organization, we focus on mindfulness as well, so linking the two would be amazing. In this article, I saw the parallels between the mindfulness and active listening, so it would be easy for me to link the two during any trainings I’m hosting. Also, what I liked about this article is that it’s relationship based. Though focusing on romantic relationships, the article read as if I was at work, because of the close nature of our staff.

 

Takeaway

The takeaway that I have from this is that research can be fun and it can be frustrating. The topic that I chose came up with numerous articles that I could not use in my work or that has little to do with what I’m focusing on but, the library’s website is great to use nonetheless. It was very easy to navigate and it ended up doing the trick to finding articles that would eventually work. I will say, the citation builder was great to have as well through their site.