Why Active Listening Skills Are Every Successful HR Leader’s Secret Weapon

This article is part of the ‘Humans not Headcount’ series, which champions progressive working practices built for real humans with lives and feelings. As work becomes more entangled with our personal sense of identity and meaning than ever before, the idea of work-life balance has become outdated: it’s all just life now. We thrive, and companies thrive, when we bring our whole selves into the office. Being a killer HR leader in today’s world therefore means going above and beyond to understand, and build working practices around, employees’ whole selves.

The problem: we don’t know how to listen

Knowing how to support someone starts with knowing how to listen.

But, strangely, it’s not something we’re ever taught how to do properly. Like with many of life’s most crucial skills — resilience, empathy, emotional intelligence — there is a prevailing view that we should leave the learning of these up to osmosis (read: chance). 85% of the information a normal person takes in is through listening — not reading or watching — but only 2% of us have had any kind of listening training. That’s a ridiculous chasm. We wouldn’t expect to learn something like long division simply by osmosis, so why do we expect that we’ll learn to listen properly — which is arguably a lot more important than long division, given the proliferation of the calculator and spreadsheet — the same way?

Resultantly, but not surprisingly, most of us are pretty terrible listeners. We immediately forget half of what we hear, and understand only a quarter of it. 75% of the time we’re not even paying proper attention to the person speaking: we’re thinking about something else or fidgeting mindlessly.

The opportunity: listening can be an HR superpower

Being really listened to, not just heard, is even more important for employees. It makes them feel that they’re respected, that they’re taken seriously and that they matter. Being listened to can often make the difference between isolation and acceptance.

And, for HR leaders, having the skills to really listen — to get employees to open up and find out what’s really on their mind — then gives you the ability to make an impact based off what you hear.

The most common trap we fall into is to listen passively. This is when we wait for someone to speak, make the appropriate nodding or mumbling reactions — the real-life equivalent of WhatsApp’s blue ticks — but don’t really engage. The other extreme is to offer too much; to launch into a monologue about your own life or bulldoze the conversation towards another topic you’re more comfortable with. Both have the effect of distancing yourself from the person you’re trying to engage with.

The solution: learning active listening skills

Active listening is about finding the sweet spot in between the two, and engaging more purposefully and mindfully with the conversation.

One organisation that knows a thing or two about active listening is the Samaritans: their experts have spent decades talking people out of suicide attempts using a tried-and-tested approach known as SHUSH. We’ve supplemented this with expert advice from the counsellors at Spill, a message-based therapy app for workplaces, who are specialists in listening to employees’ worries on a daily basis.

SHUSH

Show you care

• Put your phone away
• Make eye contact
• Try not to fidget
• Mentally put yourself in the other person’s shoes
• Picture what they’re saying in your head, either as an image or a diagram, to help you understand it
• Try not to think about what to say next: you can’t do this and listen at the same time

Have patience

• If they pause, count to three in your head — they might be trying to articulate something tricky
• Use pauses to watch for non-verbal cues
• Ask clarifying questions to ensure understanding rather than trying to move on
• Don’t rush them
• Keep the environment non-judgemental

Use open questions

• Try not to ask questions that only require a yes/no answer
• Try not to wrap up or close down conversational avenues
• Use ‘w’ words: what made you think that? When did you start feeling this way? What do you think is behind this?

Say it back

• Repeat what they’ve said back in your own words
• Check you’re on the same page: start a response with “what I’m hearing, if I understand correctly, is that…”
• Take the time to sit with any emotions that arise
• Try to really feel what they’re feeling

Have courage

• Don’t be put off by a negative response at first
• Don’t feel you have to fill a silence
• Don’t feel pressured to offer a solution right there and then: listening, understanding and empathising is often enough

Armed with these skills, you can gain the confidence to have more honest conversations in the workplace; conversations that get to the bottom of what’s really going on in people’s minds and lives more broadly.

And, more importantly, once you’ve learnt the skills of active listening you can start passing them on to others. Hold a listening ‘lunch and learn’ where you explain the SHUSH approach. Guide people through a practical exercise, like this one in groups of three where one person plays the subject, one the active listener and another the observer. Finally, try putting up these posters on meeting room doors or in toilet cubicles to remind people.

An organisation that knows how to listen is a force to be reckoned with.