Given that listening accounts for 45 per cent of time spent on communication (Eunson 2012:310), argue the importance of listening skills in the workplace. Your analysis should identify three specific listening behaviours and provide examples to demonstrate how these skills promote communication and understanding. Support your analysis with relevant communication theory and evidence from appropriate academic sources.
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Tutor: XXXXXXX Listening is an important workplace skill and is often unacknowledged. Head movements, eye contact, and strategic questions are integral listening behaviours in the workplace because they promote communication and understanding resulting in positive work environments. Head movements highlight the listener’s understanding to the speaker and help regulate verbal communication between the two, creating a collaborative atmosphere. Eye contact is a non-verbal listening behaviour used to indicate engagement, support, and provide feedback to the speaker. Strategic questions are an open style of questioning used by the listener to draw out information, clarify points of view, and build rapport. These listening skills help counter barriers to communication such as distractions, mind-reading, and tuning out, thereby creating efficient communication between speaker and listener to increase understanding in a workplace setting.
Head movements are an effective listening behaviour, which function to regulate communication and understanding of a conversation, thereby creating a collaborative atmosphere. Communication is “the production and exchange of meaning” through “transmission of messages” (Fiske 2010:2). Types of communication include verbal: using speech or writing (Eunson 2012:13), and non-verbal: using “gestures, eye movements, and qualities of voice” (Fiske 2010:63). Effective communication leads to understanding of the