Ensuring your employees feel valued is a major key to your company’s success. When employees feel valued, or important, they are much happier. And we all know people perform better when they’re happier. A recent Gallup study quantified the link between employee feelings and corporate outcomes determining that employee disengagement costs US companies $300 billion annually. $300 billion!
Value Within An Organization At A Glance:
- When asked if they felt like a valued member of the organization 46% responded positively, stating that they Strongly Agree (20%) or Agree (26%).
- When Asked the same question, 54% responded negatively, stating they Strongly Disagreed (10%), Disagree (5%), Somewhat Disagree (6%), or Somewhat Agree (33%).
IN A NUTSHELL: At first glance it seems like a lot of the people surveyed feel that they are important to their organization, but in reality the majority of people do not feel valued. Anything other than Strongly Agree or Agree should be unacceptable in a successful company.
Most companies recognize that happy employees work harder, but most of the time the same companies overlook the little things they could have done to promote happiness among their employees. We’ve all heard of company perks at places like Google and Apple that were designed to increase employee happiness and productivity, but most small-to-mid-sized companies can’t afford onsite cafeterias, fitness centers, or game rooms. Honestly, there’s a better way to make your employees happy – and it’s FREE!
The single most effective way to increase your employees’ happiness is to make them feel valued. The best way to make someone feel valued is to listen to them. Everyone wants to be heard. You might be thinking, well that’s easy enough! But, is it? I mean really listen, not just pretend to listen or listen some times to some things. I’m talking about powerful listening.
Powerful listening is being able to understand fully what another person means and being aware of what possibilities his/her speaking offers to you. It involves the capacity to see the world as another sees it and thus avail ourselves with outside perspectives, experiences, creativity, motivation, and wisdom.
The Indian poet, Krishnamurti, put the challenge of listening this way:
“I do not know if you have ever examined how you listen, it doesn’t matter to what, whether to a bird, to the wind in the leaves, to the rushing waters, or how you listen in a dialogue with yourself, to your conversation in various relationships with your intimate friends, your wife or your husband.
If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses. When they dominate, we hardly listen at all to what is being said. In that state there is no value.
One listens, and therefore learns, only in a state of attention, a state of silence, in which the whole background is in abeyance, is quiet. Then, it seems to me, it is possible to truly communicate.”
Practical first steps for powerful listening come from the work of Peter Senge and his co-authors of “The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization.”
- Stop talking. To others and to yourself. Learn to still the voice within. You can’t listen if you are talking.
- Imagine the other person’s point of view. Picture yourself in his/her position, doing his/her work, facing his/her problems, using his/her language, and having his/her values. If the person is younger or more junior, remember your own early years.
- Look, act, and be interested. Don’t read your mail, doodle, shuffle, or tap papers while others are talking.
- Observe nonverbal behavior, like body language, to glean meanings beyond what is said to you.
- Don’t interrupt. Sit still past your tolerance level, the point when you would normally speak.
- Listen between the lines for implicit meanings as well as the explicit ones. Consider connotations as well as denotations. Note figures of speech. Instead of accepting a person’s remarks as the whole story, look for omissions – things left unsaid or unexplained, which should logically be present. Ask about these.
- Speak only affirmatively while listening. Resist the temptation to jump in with an evaluative, critical or disparaging comment at the moment a remark is uttered. Confine yourself to constructive replies until criticism can be offered without blame.
- To ensure understanding, rephrase what the other person has just told you at key points in the conversation. Yes, I know this is the old “active listening” technique, but it works.
- Stop talking. This is the first and last, because all other techniques of listening depend on it. Take a vow of silence once in a while.
At eQ we teach powerful listening as a mandatory tool to becoming a successful leader because without it your organization cannot grow and succeed. If you’re interested in more ways to increase employees sense of value within your organization, contact us today and begin your journey to grow regardless!
Joe Mechlinski is the CEO of entreQuest and has partnered with countless leaders to effectively improve their team’s performance, their clients’ experience, and their company’s profits.
