While a fast-paced business environment often prioritizes performance metrics, bottom lines, and impressive quarterly reports, it’s crucial not to overlook other elements that can drive organizational success even more effectively. One such element is the organizational culture-with empathy skills at its core.
Empathy in the workplace is not just associated with a positive work environment. It brings many benefits that can significantly enhance business performance. The question that often lingers in the minds of many managers is how to foster empathy to enhance a positive work environment and what tangible benefits it can bring to the table.
This guide offers different examples of empathy and how they can improve a company’s culture.
The Importance of Empathy in Fostering a Positive Work Environment
Workplace empathy is usually the glue that holds different pieces of the organization together, without which culture would be non-existent. Before we can show you how workplace empathy is important to your work environment, let’s first debunk a common myth associated with empathy.
In many corporate workplaces, there’s a prevalent misconception that empathy is a sign of weakness. This myth often leads to the perception that leaders who demonstrate empathy are weak. However, this is far from the truth. Empathy, a sign of emotional intelligence, is a strength that can significantly enhance leadership and decision-making.
Empathy in the workplace is a quality that equips leaders with a deep understanding of the emotional landscape in their workplaces, enabling them to make better decisions.
Empathetic leaders are adept at managing teams, fostering collaboration, and resolving conflicts. By dispelling the myth that empathy is a sign of weakness, we empower leaders to embrace emotional intelligence as a powerful tool for success in the workplace.
With empathetic leaders at the helm of an organization, the organization is bound to enjoy a positive work environment because learning how to be empathetic helps in the following ways.
Build Trust
Empathy in the workplace is not just a soft skill but a powerful tool that can foster high levels of trust among employees and with the organization’s management. Trust is the cornerstone of a harmonious work environment, without which teamwork and collaboration are almost impossible.
Emotional empathy is the reason why employees feel valued and understood, and trust is what encourages open communication, which is the backbone of a positive work environment.
Enhance Collaboration
Collaboration is also another sign of a positive work environment. Collaboration entails working with two or more people to complete a project. It requires high levels of open communication and shared knowledge.
Your team needs empathy to form strong connections, feel understood, and be heard before they can willingly share ideas and skills that will drive collective success.
Reduce Conflict
A positive work environment is without conflicts. Conflicts are part of human nature, but practicing empathy can help resolve conflicts faster while reducing their frequency by promoting organization-wide empathy. Empathy enables everyone in the organization to understand and appreciate everyone else’s point of view, allowing leaders to mediate disputes with an open mind.
Increase Employee Engagement and Retention
A positive work environment includes successfully managing conflict. Employees will stay in a company not for the money but because they feel understood and appreciated. Compassionate empathy allows senior leaders to understand and respond to the needs of their employees, which then contributes to their high levels of job satisfaction.
Emotional empathy equates to higher intelligence, which increases employee retention and reduces costs associated with employee turnover.
How to Be Empathetic in a Professional Way, Without Crossing Any Boundaries
Compassionate empathy is a feeling that enables one to see things from other people’s perspectives and to feel how they feel. It means putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, acting with compassion, and doing all that is possible to improve their situation.
Still, being an empath can make you feel overwhelmed and exhausted because it entails dealing with one’s emotions and those of others. Therefore, it is important to become empathetic without crossing professional boundaries.
Here are a few tips on how to do so.
Learn to Say No
Empaths find it hard to say no, especially when they feel the other person’s pain and they would love to help them. Even though saying no feels wrong, it will be unfair to your boundaries to continuously say yes to situations that make you uncomfortable.
You should practice affective empathy, which also ensures that you share the feelings of others without affecting how you feel.
Communicate Clearly
Crossing boundaries as an empath can emerge from unclear communication. You can set boundaries to maintain workplace professionalism, but you achieve less when you don’t communicate these boundaries clearly to others. There is a high chance that these boundaries will be crossed, and you can become an empath while maintaining professional boundaries through effective communication.
In addition, you can set boundaries for yourself and others, and then you become the one crossing these boundaries. Practicing empathy also means staying on guard every time and avoiding crossing professional boundaries that can end up hurting you and the people involved.
Protect Your Energy
Emotional empathy is akin to picking up other people’s energies, no matter the case involved. If you feel overwhelmed and you experience feelings that don’t match your own feelings, breathe deeply to ground yourself before you get influenced by the other person’s energy. In such cases, you can also remove yourself temporarily from the situation and take a breather before re-entering the situation.
Explore Your Roles
As an empath, you can always choose the role you want to play if you are to remain within professional boundaries. If you become the caretaker, you will be expected to provide emotional support for others in relationships, which is not a reciprocal role, and neither is it possible to find some balance.
The role of a caretaker takes on some personal and not professional approaches, and it can create confusion when the situation is over.
Do Not Over-Empathize
Over-empathizing means taking too much of the other person’s emotions and agreeing with everything they do or say. As an empath, such situations will leave you stressed and exhausted, and you can lose your objectivity, authority, or credibility. Set healthy boundaries, such as limiting the time and energy you spend with employees to protect your emotional state.
Examples of Empathy in the Workplace
1. A manager showing empathy by listening to an employee’s personal challenges
Managers are the people in charge of employees in the workplace. More often than not, it is the manager who gets to know that an employee is productive or unproductive. The same manager will ensure that they understand why an employee is not productive, and they are responsible for making decisions regarding the employee’s situation.
Most managers tend to use metrics such as profit levels, deadlines met, and absenteeism to measure an employee’s productivity. But what happens when an employee is unproductive because of personally challenging situations?
Here’s an example of a manager showing empathy at work by listening to an employee who has a personal challenge.
Example: In Company X, there’s an unstated rule that employees should leave their personal life at the door. For three consecutive weeks, John has failed to focus on his duties. He no longer meets deadlines, and he is usually the last to submit his part of a team project. The manager has known John for five years, and this behavior is not typical for him.
Instead of labeling John as a lazy employee, the manager called him to his office and asked him what was going on in his life. John told the manager that he had lost his sister to a horrible road accident. The manager understood how such a personal challenge could affect an employee’s productivity, and he shifted John’s responsibilities and extended his deadlines to give him time to grieve properly before he could get back to work.
2. A coworker offering support and understanding during a stressful project
Before an employee asks for help from their managers, they are always likely to find some help from colleagues. Co-workers can foster empathy in the workplace in different ways, and here are a few illustrations.
Example: James and Hailey are both team members working on a complex project. The project’s deadline is drawing close fast, and Hailey is struggling with her part of the project. However, she isn’t saying much, even though James has noticed how she is seemingly stressed every day.
Without trying to pry, James considered creating a method by which each team member could communicate easily and comfortably. He installed a team app on every work computer to provide easy contact among all team members. The app allows employees to share any challenges they are facing during the project, and they can ask for help from others.
By being aware of his surroundings, James noted that Hailey was struggling and she was trying hard not to ask for help. The app is one way that James offered empathy at work.
3. A team leader acknowledges and validates an employee’s feelings of frustration
Employees are human beings, and the frustrations of the world can affect their ability to deliver on their work roles. As a team leader, you run into Michael on your way out to the parking lot at the end of a long day. Michael mentions that he has been trying to get Joshua to collaborate with him on a project that affects both their departments with little success.
Michael’s frustration is palpable because the deadline is very close, and he obviously does not have any idea how to get Joshua to fulfill his part of the project. As the team leader, you would like to help Michael without affecting his work relations with Joshua.
The best way to help Michael is to acknowledge and validate Michael’s feelings of frustration, letting him know that you hear him. You can add that Joshua might be going through something and even joke that everyone seems to be dealing with a struggle these days.
Even if it seems that you are not doing much to recognize emotions, emotional empathy validates that the emotions of others are the same as helping them find a solution to their frustrations.
4. A company implementing flexible work arrangements to accommodate employees’ needs
After the COVID-19 pandemic, several companies adopted flexible work arrangements to meet the changing needs of their employees. Dell is one such company that noticed that its employees truly valued flexibility. Some of their employees preferred to work outside standard business hours.
To ensure that their employees felt comfortable and supported, Dell asked its employees to set aside their work schedules and use online tools to collaborate with their colleagues. Dell made sure that all employees had the right training and technology to help them remain productive wherever they were.
Humana, a healthcare company, adopted flexibility to accommodate the needs of its employees. In 2016, Humana overhauled its work policies to accommodate work flexibility. Call center leaders in the same company also needed to work flexibly. Humana responded by equipping call center employees with novel at-home technology to enable them to work from home like all other employees.
Appen, a machine-learning company, also adopted flexible working hours to meet the needs of its employees. In 2017, Appen invested in different online tools to create a connected and collaborative culture. Some of these tools allowed for video conferencing, instant messaging, and document collaboration, allowing employees to work remotely at specified times.
5. A company organizing volunteer activities to support the community, fostering a sense of empathy among employees
Every year, Wegmans employees from every level of the company participate in what they popularly call “Day of Service.” On this day, the employees volunteer their time to build houses in collaboration with the local Habitat for Humanity organization.
Other employees who cannot build houses pack meals for the organization’s food banks, while others clean classrooms in preparation for a new school year.
6. A team member offering constructive feedback with empathy and respect
Ken and his colleagues received a new member into their team. The new member was crucial in the completion of the project, but Ken noted quite early that the employee preferred to work in isolation. The employee struggled to deliver when they had to work as a team and even requested to complete their part of their project alone.
Ken understood the employee, but he also understood that collaboration was essential if they had to leverage diverse perspectives. Ken approached the employee and told him that his independent work was impressive.
He also told the employee that he was missing out on great collaboration opportunities, and he asked if there was a way they could make him more comfortable when they had to work on the project together. By showing the employee that they respected his desire for independence, Ken also showed the same employee that there were more benefits to collaborating with others.
7. A company providing mental health resources and support for employees
Ring Central, a cloud communications company, understands the importance of employee well-being and mental health. As a means to provide them with the support they need, RingCentral offered its employees paid time off to recharge. The company called these days “Caring Days,” and it came in the form of an extra paid holiday and an extended weekend after every quarter.
Thermo Fisher Scientific is another example of a company that understands that its employees need a variety of benefits to enhance their emotional well-being. Thermo Fisher Scientific created a paid time donation program, which included a wellness program, fitness incentive, and flexible work arrangements to promote their employees’ mental health and wellness.
8. A manager showing empathy by recognizing and addressing burnout symptoms in team members
Leaders should use cognitive empathy to help a team member show signs of burnout, and that starts with watching out for signs of burnout. A manager of a packaging company took extra time every week to check with his team members on how they were handling their current workload. The company had received double their usual orders because they were running a promotion. The manager recognized the emotions that define burnout. The team consistently became disengaged while working, were no longer accepting additional work projects, and were not keen on changing even after receiving feedback on their negative behavior.
The manager employed cognitive empathy to understand how the team members were feeling, and he tailored his leadership style to inspire them. Later, he gave them time off to refresh and regain their strength before they resumed their work.
9. A coworker offers to assist a colleague struggling with a heavy workload, demonstrating empathy in action
Co-workers are known to help each other out, especially when their colleagues are struggling with a heavy workload. Jane, Sasha, and Sally made plans for the weekend. The plan entailed catching up with their college mates. By Thursday, Jane and Sasha trusted their gut instincts when they noticed that Sally was downcast.
Sally’s computer had malfunctioned and deleted half of the report she was to deliver before the next week. Jane and Sasha decided to assist Sally by dividing the report into three equal parts. By Friday, the entire report was complete, and the ladies were free to proceed with their weekend plans.
Empower Your Team With Empathy
Showing cognitive empathy at work is a critical component in improving the workplace culture, teamwork, and employees’ emotional well-being. Company culture is important because the workplace brings different employees together, but these employees can enjoy shared perspectives by adopting an empathetic approach to working together.
Cognitive empathy, compassionate empathy, and affective empathy are applicable in different work situations, and each type has its associated benefits. Senior leaders can run peaceful organizations if they can understand non-verbal cues and use active listening to understand the needs of their employees.Contact Pollack Peacebuilding to learn how our communication workshop and other conflict training programs can help your organization harness the power of empathy for greater success and satisfaction across your team. Together, we can build a more understanding and effective workplace.
