As the Kenan Institute’s 2025 Grand Challenge turns a spotlight on skills gaps in the workforce, one often overlooked competency is proving critical across industries: the ability to truly listen. While technical skills dominate conversations about the future of work, employers consistently report a shortfall in soft skills (often referred to as “durable skills”), particularly communication and emotional intelligence. This isn’t just an interpersonal issue; poor listening practices can have serious consequences for organizations.

In this Kenan Insight, Melissa Geil, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School clinical associate professor of management and corporate communication, explores what she identifies as a “listening crisis” and what leaders can do to correct course.

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On the podcast series “Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal,” productivity guru Cliff Weitzman proudly described his listening routine: “I wake up in the morning, AirPods go in, I start listening. I brush my teeth, I’m listening. I’m cooking breakfast, I’m listening. I take them out when I’m eating breakfast with my teammates and then if I have five minutes between a Zoom call and I’m out, I’ll listen … My AirPods just don’t leave my ears … And so all that dead time in a day, I’m listening to a book, but I’m listening at 3x speed.”¹

Weitzman’s always-on consumption exemplifies a growing trend in how we engage with information: “extractive listening.”² Rather than deeply engaging with content, individuals mine it for useful tidbits, often while multitasking and listening at accelerated speeds. This shift in listening practices represents a fundamental change in people’s relationship with communication, particularly pronounced among younger generations who have been raised in an environment of constant information availability.

The business outcomes of increasing levels of extractive listening present us a double-edged sword. On the one hand, individuals acquire knowledge at a greater pace than ever before. On the other hand, this myopic form of acquisition forestalls deeper understanding and thought exchange and prevents the questioning of ideas and sources. A person can listen to every book and podcast they want at 4x speed, but are they having a dialogue with the speaker? Are they asking questions about the content? Are they listening simply to memorize or to understand and connect?

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The Decline of Deep Listening: Evidence and Context

Research suggests that our listening capabilities have deteriorated significantly in recent decades. According to the International Listening Association, the average person typically remembers only about 25% of what they hear immediately after hearing it, and this percentage declines further over time. The constant barrage of information we experience daily has trained our brains to engage in “continuous partial attention” – a state where attention is perpetually divided between multiple streams of input. And this inattentiveness shows up at work. For example, in a survey of over 650 employers, 55 percent of them highlighted listening skills as one of the most difficult qualities to find in job candidates.³

Generation Z, who grew up in an environment saturated with digital media and notifications, has developed listening habits centered on information extraction rather than comprehension and connection. They’ve become adept at quickly scanning for relevant data points while filtering out everything else – a skill that, while useful for managing information overload, fundamentally alters the nature of communication. Gen Z may think that they’ve mastered “continuous partial attention” and extractive listening while they’re multitasking on a Zoom call, but they’re missing out on opportunities to connect, understand, collaborate and build rapport.

Moreover, the isolation epidemic exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic created fewer opportunities for Gen Z to learn how to communicate and develop their social emotional intelligence.⁴

Extractive Listening Can Be Costly in Business

Extractive listening can create significant negative consequences that impair organizational performance and productivity. When employees don’t feel genuinely heard, they experience greater stress, withhold valuable information, resist change and are more likely to leave the organization – all of which have quantifiable impacts on productivity and organizational effectiveness. For example, leaders often find themselves in information bubbles because “employees are afraid of questioning, challenging, second-guessing or disappointing them,” which then leads those in charge to have distorted perceptions of organizational reality.⁵ Employers with poor listening records experience increased turnover, damaged trust and credibility, loss of productivity, reduced innovation and heightened resistance to change.

In our age of artificial intelligence, the ability for machines to extract, process and engage in deep learning is vital for the analysis of the overabundance of data that businesses must process to perform essential functions. Extractive listening, however, diminishes the opportunities for people to engage in their own deeper learning. Judith Shapiro and John-Andrew McNeish suggest letting the algorithm learn for you produces a dependance that “could hinder the ability to find new things and escape algorithmically created echo chambers.”⁶ Listening to mine and not to understand hands over the power of learning and deep work to others – machines, people, algorithms – and can obviate innovation, creative solutions and collaboration.

Rebuilding Our Listening Capacity

Whether through lackluster “institutional listening,” transactional listening seeking to extract value, or collecting feedback without genuine intention to use it, employees and employers need strategies to move forward and rebuild their authentic listening skills. Below are some tips to get for thinking about how to approach listening habits at work.

Focus on active listening strategies and listen to understand, not to talk, focusing on the speaker’s experiences rather than one’s responses. Being fully present, and “listening” not just to the speaker’s words, but how they sound when they speak the words and how they seem. Active listening pays attention to the whole person and requires full attention.

Moreover, when listening, be prepared to act, especially in a professional setting. Developing a comprehensive listening architecture with accountability mechanisms and feedback loops helps to showcase that the speaker is being heard and that the listener will be accountable for their part.

Rebuilding collective listening capacity represents one of the most important communication challenges at the moment. To navigate an increasingly complex and divided world, the ability to truly hear others –not just extract information from them – may be the foundation upon which meaningful dialogue and understanding can be constructed. The question remains whether society can resist the pull toward ever-faster information extraction long enough to remember what deep listening feels like, and why it matters.

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• Keyword(s):
• organizational behavior 184
• skills gap 15