How To Improve Your Business Value Through Organizational Listening

Listening is one of the most underrated communication skills both at personal and business levels. In our day-to-day conversations, we usually find ourselves responding to issues without necessarily listening to what the other party is saying. This has often led to disagreements, misconceptions, and mistakes.

With the ever-evolving needs and lifestyle changes, consumers have today become more sophisticated and demanding. What this means, essentially, is that businesses must now, more than ever before, pay attention to what consumers want lest they be rendered obsolete.

While this might be the case, most organizations haven’t put in place proper mechanisms to listen, capture, and act on market sentiments. Indeed, a quick scan through today’s business landscape reveals how most marketing communication tactics are mostly one-way instead of two-way. This has resulted in many businesses missing out on big opportunities.

Organizational listening can be defined as an active and continuous process of scanning and collating views from stakeholders for timely action. This covers a whole spectrum of the stakeholders across the entire organization – customers, clients, employees, suppliers, and vendors among others. For commercial entities, this would mainly involve listening to expressions, both negative and positive, regarding your products, services, and operations, among other facets of the company.

Top companies are doing exceptionally well because they consistently search for ways to improve through organizational listening. Undeniably, there is a lot that you can learn from such companies, to help improve your own business. How then, should you go about organizational listening to improve your value?

1. Establish Feedback Mechanisms
The first step would be to put in place systems that would allow you to capture feedback from both internal and external stakeholders. This should begin with formulating an elaborate policy and procedure detailing how the information will be collected, the mediums to be used, and the frequency.

As a small business, this could be as simple as having a feedback book at the reception and analyzing reviews and comments on social media or the website. Digital technology has made organizational listening much easier. You can be proactive by conducting periodical surveys instead of waiting for feedback to come in via social media or websites. By ensuring feedback loops are set, you are better positioned to make smart decisions to improve overall business performance.

2. Build a Culture of Listening and Engagement
As a business owner or manager, you should establish an open organization that fosters a culture of listening, dialogue, and engagement. The initiative ought to start with employees who should know that they can talk freely and can be heard. The best way is to lead by example and actions that would inspire other staff members. For instance, you can hold sessions where you only dedicate time to listen to staff issues without criticism or interjections.

Once the openness culture has taken root, it will be much easier to leverage it when dealing with customers and other stakeholders. They will learn and understand that your company is a listening organization and as such, they’ll feel free to share their innermost thoughts and expressions.

3. Follow Through on the Feedback
Perhaps one of the biggest drawbacks when it comes to organizational listening is the lack of action on the feedback collected. Collating information from people is a good thing in itself but it doesn’t amount to anything if no action is taken. If you have a tendency of collecting feedback and not act upon it, you will quickly lose the trust of the stakeholders.

You need to take what you learn from the various feedback mechanisms that you have put in place to make meaningful changes for the affected parties. You can always follow up and ask for even more information because active listening is not a one-off thing─ it’s a continuous process that allows your business to be better every day. When stakeholders trust that you take their feedback seriously, they’ll be more inclined to give it in the future.

Indeed, there’s no doubt that organizational listening holds great potential for boosting business value. A company like Safaricom, a leading force in telecommunication in Kenya, has been able to provide great products and services, having listened to its customers. Some of the products that came off their organizational listening include internet bundles with no expiry and Fuliza among many others. As an SME, it is therefore important that you forge an open interactive communication environment in which the views and interests of others are recognized and respected. This should be underpinned by relationships, dialogue, and engagement with the stakeholders. The insights gained should be quickly leveraged to improve business performance.

Stephen Osomba currently serves as the Lead Partner, Communication & Marketing at SMD Consulting Associates where he helps SME clients deliver value by adjusting the solutions to each company's mission, product, strategy, and industry.