Developing listening skills through emotional intelligence, mindfulness – Scholar Q&A with Fay Chen

Fay Chen, University of San Francisco, and Katie Place, Quinnipiac University, are conducting research to cultivate ethical listening competencies that can help organizations engage employees in the post-COVID era. Collaborating with Ann Barlow, executive vice president and chief engagement officer at Peppercomm, and John McCartney, founder and principal at Jmac Public Relations, they will conduct interviews, observe procedures and analyze documents to build an understanding of how organizations use emotional intelligence and mindfulness to develop listening skills. The project is part of the Page Center’s 2024 research call featuring scholar/practitioner collaborations. Chen and Place are three-time Page Center scholars. Place is a former Page Center senior research fellow. In this Q&A, Chen discusses the origin of the research project, forming the practitioner collaborations and delivering guidance to organizations so they can listen and be mindful of their workforce.

Can you talk about how the collaboration with the four of you started?

The way we put this collaboration together was kind of fun. Ann and I first connected through the Institute for Public Relations. We were chatting with professionals at some events about their challenges with employee engagement. During a conversation with Ann, I learned that Peppercomm has some very unique and very fun practices for engagement that cultivate the employees’ listening skills. She mentioned using comedy training to build these skills. I was like, ‘Oh, tell me more.’ She gave me a couple of examples and I started thinking about it. John is an old friend of mine from PRSA, and at a PRSA event he mentioned how important it is to engage employees, especially for a small boutique PR firm like his. Katie and I got together and started discussing how to explore this opportunity after her presentation on listening at the International Public Relations Research Conference. Katie is an expert in listening research and was interested in exploring the relationships among emotional intelligence, mindfulness, and listening. Given their exemplar practices, we thought of Ann and John as collaborators. Their companies are different sizes and have different approaches, so we thought collaborating with both would offer richer insights.

What are your goals for this Page Center project?

We were really driven by the pressing questions from today's leaders and public relations professionals. In our post-COVID era, people are working from home, our society is feeling polarized and the questions from leaders are: How do we effectively engage our employees and build an inclusive, ethical workplace and culture? How do we cultivate ethical listening competencies in the face of all these challenges? That’s what we aim to explore.
We tapped into the public relations research literature on listening and realized that the literature is very rich. People have talked about organizational listening and interpersonal listening, but the big question still remains. How can we cultivate listening competencies? That is when we started diving into the interdisciplinary literature related to mindfulness and emotional intelligence.

What is your plan to answer these questions?

We built a really nice theoretical model. We aim to explore that model through a mixed method approach. So, the first step is qualitative case studies with our two practitioner partners, Peppercomm and Jmac PR, through in-depth interviews, document analysis and participant observation. From there, we will analyze the data and get further insights, because there are things that we probably don't know already. We will add that to the model. We will refine our model and pass it through a larger scale survey. We went to New York this summer and conducted our participant observation with Peppercomm. We are continuing the qualitative part over the next couple of months with both Peppercomm and Jmac PR. After that, we will analyze our qualitative data and move forward with the quantitative part.

What kind of differences do you anticipate seeing between the two companies?

They're both excellent organizations that do a wonderful job when it comes to employee engagement, cultivating listening skills, mindfulness and emotional intelligence. I can't say for sure what the distinctive differences are until after the research is completed, but we are assuming that some of the differences may come from their organizational sizes, corporate culture, and also their leadership characteristics. These organizations are the exemplars, but we need to cater that to other organizations and the needs of other organizational cultures. We can’t just copy from one organization. That is why the second step of the study is very necessary, because in-depth insights from the qualitative interviews can be incorporated into a larger scale quantitative study that is more generalizable.

Once you have these insights, what does a guide look like in terms of sharing it with other companies?

We want to give companies practical insights that are relevant to professionals. The model is the first step in providing the empirical evidence. Obviously, we will need the empirical evidence on how emotional intelligence and mindfulness can influence individuals’ listening competencies, which then can influence organizational outcomes and organizational listening. We want to provide some tangible and practical guidelines on the what and the how for organizations of different sizes.

How does the Page Center and this legacy scholar grant help you reach these research goals?

We are very grateful for the support from the Page Center. I want to emphasize that the support isn't just monetary, even though the financial support is a big part. Without the funding we would not be able to conduct such a large scale, mixed methods approach, which can be expensive. It allowed us to travel, pay participants and get our study done. But on top of that, it's really the resources and connections from the Page Center. It’s opportunities like interviewing for this blog post and participating in the Roundtable discussions. At the Roundtable, we were able to talk to like-minded scholars to see what they're doing, exchange ideas and hear insights from Page Center board members. There is an abundance of resources at the Page Center that can help us conduct better research that matters to the profession.