Listening has many positive effects for organizations. The listening increases trust, commitment, job satisfaction among many other things. Despite the positive impact and that organizations have more communication channels than ever before, too little time is spent listening to customers, employees, and significant other stakeholders. How can it be so? The simple answer is that it is difficult, but it is possible to get better at it, both as an organization and as an employee. Organizations need to manage listening as a strategic issue to be able to exploit this great potential. At the same time as managers and employees need to be made aware of the importance of listening and practice it.
Listening is an aspect of communication that has received much attention the last couple of years, and the pandemic made the importance of listening in organizations even more important. In communication between humans, listening is a particularly important part of creating and maintaining good relationships, trust, and psychological safety. Research shows that when managers are bad at listening, it can lead to higher turnover, burnout, dissatisfaction, and low commitment among employees. Listening to customers is another aspect that also has got more attention both in practice and research.
The main aim of the book is to increase knowledge about listening and help organizations and individuals become better at strategic listening. And through this, contribute to strengthening the listening skills of organizations and individuals. The book provides both theoretical explanations and practical tools, and in the last chapter the authors present their model of how organizations can work more systematically with listening.
About the Author: Mats Heide (Ph.D.) is Professor of Strategic Communication at the Department of Strategic Communication, Lund University, Sweden. Heide together with colleagues introduced the field of strategic communication in Sweden. He has also, together with colleagues, driven the development of the Department of Strategic Communication at Lund University. For over 20 years, he has researched social media and organizational learning, change communication, crisis communication and conducted professional studies of communication practitioners. During 2014-2018, he was project manager for one of the world's largest research projects on communicative organizations. It was in this project that Mats discovered the importance of strategic listening. During the years 2020-2022, Mats had a three-year continuation project »Communicative public organizations together with Charlotte Simonsson and Rickard Andersson. The focus of this project was the trust of organizations, which was studied based on three areas: employees, digitalization, and the communicator's changed role as a business developer. In this project too, listening was an important factor.
Heide is the author and co-author of 16 books and many book chapters and articles. He has written several textbooks on strategic communication, organizational communication, and crisis communication. Recently the following books have been published. Strategic Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Global Practice (together with Jesper Falkheimer, Routledge, 2023), Strategic Internal Communication (together with Susanne Dahlman, Routledge 2020) and Internal Crisis Communication (together with Charlotte Simonsson, Routledge, 2019). Heide is also editor together with Jesper Falkheimer for Research Handbook of Strategic Communication (Elgar Publishing, 2023) with 59 international chapter contributors. Mats also works as a consultant with lecture, advisory and networking assignments for both private companies and public organizations.
Anette Svingstedt (Ph.D.) is senior lecturer in Service studies at Lund University. Svingstedt has a 20-year, previous management career within the private business life in industries such as hotels and restaurants and the travel industry.
In these businesses, Anette has been manager, co-owner and CEO. During these years, the interest and commitment to leadership in service activities was awakened. In 2012, Anette defended her thesis in service science with a thesis on the customer meeting, and how this important meeting between representatives of organizations and those they are there for needs to be managed and organized based on a strategic service perspective. Since her dissertation, she has researched and taught in areas such as service management, leadership, value creation and sustainable services. Svingstedt has also been head of the Department of Service Management with almost 70 researchers and administrative staff.
From a service perspective, the starting point is that the organization must have the customer's focus and in order to be successful. Regardless of whether it concerns a private or public organization, it is of central importance to listen both inwardly to the employees and outwardly to those who use the organization's services. This is to create an organizational infrastructure that enables good quality in the meeting with the customer. In addition to her thesis, Anette has written debate articles, book chapters on the customer meeting and scientific articles on the theme of value creation, professionalism, and leadership. In addition, since 2002, Anette has worked as a consultant and lecturer in both the private and public sectors.
