This article is written by Jim Macnamara, Distinguished Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney.

Listening to citizens is at the heart of any democracy.

Stakeholder and community engagement is a key activity for government departments and agencies. Today, engagement is undertaken online as well as offline as part of public communication, or as part of policy development, or both.

As well as giving stakeholders and citizens voice, which is a key principle of democracy, engagement is also a source of information and data that can usefully inform government policy.

However, a key element of engagement often falls between the cracks. A study I led in Australia, the UK, and the USA found that, on average, 80% of government resources and time devoted to communication including engagement are focussed on distributing information and government messages — i.e., speaking. In many cases, less than 10% of communicative resources are devoted to listening.

Furthermore, the study found that organisations frequently lack the systems, tools, and skills for listening as it is required in an organisational context.

The challenge of listening

But while listening has received considerable attention in an interpersonal context, being a focus in psychology, personnel management, and leadership studies, listening has received little attention in a broader organisational context.

Organisations face special challenges in terms of listening. First, in order to give attention to all relevant stakeholders and citizens, organisations typically have to listen at scale – often to thousands and sometimes to hundreds of thousands of people. Second, the voice of stakeholders and citizens is largely mediated, through, for example, written submissions, letters, e-mails, and social media posts. Third, because of scale and various forms of mediation, organisational listening usually cannot be undertaken directly by policymakers and decision makers – rather, it is mostly delegated to functions such as research, customer service, call centres, stakeholder engagement, or consultation.

Delegated, mediated listening at scale requires systems, tools, and skills for analysing large bodies of data including unstructured data. For example, open-ended comments in surveys and polls, submissions to consultations, letters, and e-mails arrive as text, and phone calls (e.g., to call centres) are received as audio. People tell their stories and express their views and concerns in words far more precisely and in more detail than they can in numbers such as ratings and scores in surveys and polls.

When the founder of the Ogilvy advertising agency, David Ogilvy was asked how one could understand Americans, he famously replied: “Get on a bus and go to Iowa.”

Organisational listening therefore requires text analysis, not only statistical analysis of ratings, scores, and tick-a-box responses. In particular, effective organisational listening of large bodies of text requires advanced analysis tools such as machine learning text analysis software as well as staff or specialist suppliers with the necessary skills to use it.

But research has found that many government departments and agencies do not have access to the tools required for making sense of large bodies of textual data. For example, a study of government communication and engagement in the UK found one major national consultation received 127,400 submissions, with many containing multiple pages totalling more than one million words. Identifying key themes and the most common views and concerns was beyond the capability of staff relying on manual reading and reporting.

Unstructured textual data such as submissions and letters, even PDFs, can be "text scraped" into text analysis software programs. In particular, digital text can be quickly and easily analysed using automated or semi-automated machine learning software. Some fully automated systems lack customisation features and fail to understand nuance and text that is not recognisable by standard dictionaries, such as comments from people of non-English speaking backgrounds. Hence, machine learning systems in which analysts can “teach” the algorithms used and correct misinterpretations are preferred.

In addition to the use of technologies such as online consultation applications and computer-aided text analysis, there are three other key elements to consider.

1. Outreach

Effective organisational listening requires outreach to directly engage with silent majorities and marginalised and disengaged groups. If you simply sit back and wait for feedback and input, many voices are likely to be missing from discussion.

This leads to inequities, and increases the risk of making poor decisions based solely on input from the most vocal stakeholders and citizens. Despite the internet and digitalisation, effective organisational listening often requires getting out of the office and visiting affected communities to talk face to face.

When the founder of the Ogilvy advertising agency, David Ogilvy was asked how one could understand Americans, he famously replied: “Get on a bus and go to Iowa.”

2. Ongoing commitment and deliberation

Organisational listening often needs to be undertaken over time and through multiple interactions in order to achieve deliberative engagement.

Listening to occasional polls and stakeholder satisfaction surveys provides a useful snapshot, but deep understanding and gaining thoughtful, well-informed views and inputs requires sustained listening.

3. Responding

Very importantly, listening is also much more than hearing. Whereas hearing involves the receipt of information (aurally, digitally, or physically), listening involves acknowledgement, paying attention, giving consideration to what is requested or proposed, and giving a response.

Response does not necessarily have to be agreement or acceptance, but unless a response is provided, stakeholders and communities mostly assume that they have not been listened to.

Therefore, engagement and consultation projects need to plan and allocate resources for acknowledging contributions (e.g., thank you e-mails), data analysis, consideration of input and feedback, and response – not simply data collection.

In return for this investment, open effective organisational listening can provide valuable insights to understand stakeholders and communities, inform strategy and planning, contribute to policy, and create trust and support. At the end of the day, people gain more satisfaction and trust from being listened to than from being talked at. — Jim Macnamara

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More information on Jim Macnamara’s organisational listening research is available in
Macnamara, J. (2019). Explicating listening in organisation-public communication: Theory, practices, technologies_. International Journal of Communication,_ 13, pp. 5183–5204. Available open source at https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/11996/2839

(Picture credit: Unsplash)