Active listening strategies can help your team build and maintain good relationships with their peers and reduce workplace conflicts. For customer-facing staff, active listening skills allows them to understand their customer and offer better services. Hone your team’s active listening skills through this list of 10 active listening training courses.
When your team doesn’t actively listen, they’re more likely to misinterpret instructions and incorrectly execute a task. This means using additional time and resources to start over and redo the task again.
A manager or team lead who doesn’t actively listen can also be emotionally disconnected from their team. This might make it harder to address team members’ concerns in times of conflict and stress.
What is active listening training?
Active listening training is a program that focuses on helping your team fully understand what’s being said during a conversation. It often includes practical exercises and role-playing scenarios that put theoretical knowledge into practice, since every conversation will be different from the next.
An effective active listening course usually tackles the following techniques:
Giving undivided attention and focusing on what the other party is saying instead of your response.
Watching out for verbal and non-verbal cues like tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions that could add more insight on the true intent behind their words.
Providing feedback by summarizing, rephrasing, or echoing the words back to confirm understanding.
Keeping an open mind during the conversation even if you have disagreeing opinions with the speaker.
Asking clarifying questions after the speaker is done talking. It’s advised to avoid cutting them off and let them finish their piece before thoughtfully replying.
What makes active listening so important?
Active listening focuses on fully understanding what someone is trying to say. It requires a full digestion of what’s being said for easier conflict resolution and effective communication. Here’s what active listening has to offer to your team:
Strong relationships built on trust: makes sure everyone feels heard and understood, building trust and creating healthy relationships.
Conflict resolution: focuses on understanding the perspective of each party to come to a solution that best addresses everyone’s concerns.
Improved team collaboration: when everyone is free to voice out their thoughts, they’re motivated to share their ideas and feedback for a more fruitful brainstorming session.
Boosted productivity: lessens the likelihood of miscommunication, reducing the risk of incorrectly executing tasks and minimizing the need for do-overs.
Help your team practice active listening with Mitti (by SafetyCulture)
A great deal of online training courses can help you build your team’s active listening skills. However, it’s important to look for features that empowers your team to confidently put their learnings into practice.
Mitti (by SafetyCulture)’s active listening skills training comes with carefully curated features that effectively trains your team to be active listeners.
Gamification templates: motivate your team to complete their active listening training. Improve their retention of key information with gamification templates that keep them engaged throughout their training.
Blended learning: conduct in-person active listening exercises to make sure your team is getting something out of their training. Our blended learning feature lets you track their performance in and out of the platform for a detailed analysis of their progress.
Discussions: encourage your team to share a recent experience that left them feeling unheard. With the Discussions feature, they can practice their active listening skills and relate with co-learners all within the platform.
Achievements: give recognition to team members who fully complete lessons in their active listening training. Achievements give your team milestones to reach, pushing them to complete their training faster with a little bit of positive reinforcement.
Teach your team to hear and be heard with Mitti (by SafetyCulture)’s active listening training. Sign up for free today.