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High impact employee workshops tailored to your team  Enhancing employee engagement, skills and performance  

What is poor listening costing your organization?

What you can do about it!

Listening is a critical skill in business, and yet it is one of the most commonly overlooked drivers of economic results. Organizations with a Listen First mindset have employees who are more engaged, committed, team-oriented, and productive, and customers who remain loyal. Most tangibly, organizations who foster a positive listening environment show gains in sales and net income. We also celebrate Listen First Businesses for championing this workplace and societal virtue. 

  • Discover what listening means to your employees, each person's listening style, and how to build your team around a common set of core principles.

  • Learn effective listening techniques and specific behaviors that drive results.

  • Practice the skills necessary to become a professional listener.

  • Engage employees beyond the workshop by infusing communications with Listen First principles that foster a positive team listening environment.

“The ability to listen is as important as the ability to speak.”
— Sheryl Sandberg

Key outcomes of building a Listen First business environment

  • Enhanced engagement, commitment, collaboration, and innovation

    • Firms that communicate effectively are over 4 times more likely to report high levels of employee engagement versus firms that communicate less effectively

    • Companies that are highly effective communicators are 20 percent more likely to experience lower turnover rates than their peers

    • 87% of employees who experience incivility at work say it negatively impacts their job performance. 24% of all Americans have quit a job because of an uncivil workplace

  • Increased effectiveness communicating with customers and stakeholders

    • 53% of Americans have stopped buying from a company because of uncivil representatives

    • 68% of customer loss is caused by an attitude of indifference

  • Elevated organizational performance

    • Communication failures cost Fortune 500 companies an average of $62.4 million per year, while costing small companies $420,000 per year

    • Productivity losses resulting from communication barriers cost $26,041 per worker per year

    • Companies that communicate effectively have a 19.4 percent higher market premium than companies that do not

    • Shareholder returns for organizations with the most effective communication were over 57 percent higher than were returns for firms with less effective communication

    • Google's internal study to uncover the top traits of best performing managers found that great managers are great listeners.

“Great managers are great listeners—this enables understanding.”
— Google's 10 Year Study on Best Managers
“Business people need to listen at least as much as they need to talk. ”
— Lee Iacocca

 

Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale opened Gallery Furniture in 1981 with $5,000, his own pickup truck, and the support from his wife, Linda. He invests heavily in creating a learning-centered work environment. By his own admission, he has hired hundreds of consultants, but the most important skill he has ever learned?                                   Listening! 

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Graham Bodie, PhD
Chief Listening Officer

Email Graham@ListenFirstProject.org to discuss training

Client Feedback

68% say the workshop will improve their listening 'a lot' or 'tremendously'

84% would be interested in additional listening training

“I learned how much my team and I can improve our understanding of clients by being better listeners.

I learned that improving my listening skills will allow me to better control conversations and engage in a more effective manner.

Listening is a skill that I thought I was good at, didn’t need to practice. This brought listening to the front of my mind, seeing that I can always improve.

None of us are as good at listening as we think we are, but we can get better.

I learned that I have to practice listening and make it a priority.

Pre-workshop survey and customized packets really opened my eyes to a skill I rarely think about.

Engaging and impactful.”
— Workshop participants
“What are we going to do today to bring energy to the way we listen to our customers? You know listening to those customers is the world’s greatest compliment, because nobody else listens do they? It all starts, it all ends with taking care of those customers, every single day. After being in the sales business for 33 years, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal quoting Graham Bodie, a communications professor. I called Graham and he started teaching us classes on listening, and it’s totally changed the game. For 33 years I had been a terrible listener, and now Graham teaches us how to listen to the customers better. And I’ve had several customers tell me for the first time in my career, ‘thank you for listening.’ We gotta let them tell their story; we gotta listen to those customers. And when they tell their story, they tell us how to sell them. Our salespeople have seen 10-20% increases in sales because they’re listening to the customer. An amazing thing.”
— Jim McIngvale, Owner & Operator of Houston's Gallery Furniture empire

Ready to join the movement?