Listening in Organizations: The Basis of Engagement, Trust, Healthy Democracy, Business Sustainability, and Social Equity

This post by Jim Macnamara originally appeared on the University of Technology Sydney's website in July 2015.

Two-way communication, engagement, dialogue, conversations, collaboration, and participation are buzzwords in contemporary public communication practices such as political communication, government communication, relationship marketing, corporate communication, and public relations.

Government, corporate, and many non-government organizations, with which citizens have to deal every day, spend millions of dollars, pounds, and Euros on public communication every year.

But how well do organizations implement two-way communication, engagement and dialogue — in particular, how well do they listen — the essential corollary of speaking in communication?

An international research study has found that, with some notable exceptions, organizations overwhelmingly create an ‘architecture of speaking’ with their substantial investments in public communication, designed and used to disseminate their messages. Despite their claims for two-way communication, engagement, and dialogue, they listen sporadically, selectively, and sometimes not at all.

When organizations do listen, it is predominantly for instrumental purposes to serve their own interests, such as gaining intelligence to ‘target’ potential consumers of products and services. The University of Technology Sydney conducted a two-year research project to explore listening in organizations. You can read the full report here.