The results of an Arthur W. Page Society membership survey measures how well we understand the listening process.

Since listening occupies more time than any other communication activity, we can hardly deny that we listen a great deal of the time. Whether we listen effectively, however, is another matter.

An e-mail survey of the Page Society membership made prior to the Annual Conference elicited responses that indicated 75 percent of the members thought they were good listeners. Not so, said Don Wright and Don Stacks who presented the survey results in Charleston. Wright is a professor of communications at the University of South Alabama and chair of the Society's Research Committee. Stacks is a professor of communications at the University of Miami and the author of several books and articles on listening. In addition, he is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Listening and former head of the listening division of the National Communications Association.

Together, Wright and Stacks weighed the responses they received from their survey and compared them to existing scholarly benchmarks and other theoretical background about listening. What they found is that the majority of Page members appear to have only an average understanding about the principles of listening.

One of the principles of listening, Wright said, is that "listening is an active process; it's not something that just happens. It takes energy, it takes commitment, and it's a skill of critical importance to overall communications effectiveness." While research suggests that PR people, on average, spend about 50 percent of their time listening, the U.S. Department of Labor says the average American worker spends even more time at work listening.

The Page member survey found differences in how people listen based upon gender, and these findings are confirmed in other research. "Essentially," Wright said, "men rarely listen for very long without interrupting. Women see listening as an opportunity to connect with the other person and they interrupt less."

A significant part of the survey involved asking members whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of 22 statements that constituted the so-called benchmark comparisons. Half of the statements were drawn from studies by one of the leading authorities on listening behavior, Dr. Larry Barker, and the other half were statements created specifically for the Page survey.

The answers were graded from excellent to good to average to poor, although Wright and Stacks diplomatically described the last category as "opportunities for improvement." An example of an "excellent" answer was when 97 percent of the respondents knew that "Listening is only a matter of understanding the words of the speaker" was a false statement. At the other end of the spectrum, only 48 percent knew that "Listening is largely a matter of intelligence" was false.

One of the more surprising "opportunities for improvement" was that "taking lots of notes" was considered bad listening technique. When challenged on this by some compulsive note-takers, they were told, "A good listener should be able to hear and digest everything without taking lots of notes. When we become overly dependent upon writing, we don't work our memory as much as we should."

(As they thought it would, the debate on note-taking carried over into the Q&A session. Stacks added that, "It's a question of how you take notes. If you're writing down exactly what the speaker is saying, you're not listening. You have to learn to take notes effectively just as you learn to listen. The key to listening is establishing the relationship between you and the other person. If you're focusing so much on notes, you're missing the body language, the feel of what's being said, and you're not getting the entire message.")

Among other findings in the survey was the fact that many public relations people tend to get caught up on language when listening to others. "We stereotype speakers," Wright said, "who mispronounce or make grammatical errors. We shouldn't allow ourselves to become overly distracted with errors in speech, but we know that's very difficult for someone in this business to deal with."

The study also examined aspects of how Page members listen in international settings. Two-thirds say they listen differently overseas and nearly 60 percent claimed to listen differently to someone speaking with a foreign accent. Wright and Stacks argued that improvement is needed in these areas because "we should listen for ideas, regardless of the language or the vocal inflection of the speaker."

In addition to learning how Page members assess themselves as listeners, the survey also probed how others -- superiors or clients -- listened to them. Summing up, Wright said, "Chief public relations officers clearly can tell when their boss or an important client has stopped listening to them. They also look for non-verbal signs of listening when presenting ideas. And more than 70 percent think the person they are talking to is actively listening to their suggestions."

By comparison, CEOs were perceived to be better listeners and more likely to listen for facts, not for central themes or ideas. Survey results also showed that CEOs take fewer notes and are more likely to need things repeated, even when they say they're listening.

The conclusions that Wright and Stacks drew from their study is that while listening is important, most people don't listen very well. Furthermore, few seek out information regarding how to become better listeners. And in spite of the increasing importance of listening for corporate communications effectiveness, most CPROs do not emphasize listening as much as they call attention to other communications tasks such as writing and speaking.