More than ever, there are increasing concerns amongst employees of job security, financial security and even the future of their industry. As the world still grapples with the continuing onslaught and partnering fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s more important than ever for organisations to approach decisions and actions with empathy toward their most valuable assets—their people.
To best care for its people, an organisation must have a culture of empathy. A culture of empathy considers its people first and foremost in its decision-making processes. It maps out what the flow-on impact will be when pressure is applied to certain areas of the business to understand what this impact will have on its people. It also considers how it can care for those that will be impacted.
Let’s use Company A below as a case study.
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Company A
A medium-sized company decides that they want to launch a new product. The next product in a recent line of three other new products (one of which is still being put to market) that haven’t quite hit the mark. Leadership is excited at what this new product means for its business and sees that it will be super successful if they get it right. They press the go button, blinded by their need to push ahead with development and the promise of success that this potentially means for them. It could change their game. Leadership funnels the information to management, who are told to prep their teams to make it happen.
Management calls team meetings and passes the information on to the people in their department—the ones that make the actual product a reality. They’re already under the strain of a heavy workload and then adding a new product to their plate. The employees, also additionally under the pressure of psychological insecurity relating to the pandemic, and for fear of standing out or being isolated if they say something about how unrealistic what they’re being asked to do, stay quiet. Right now, to these vulnerable employees, having financial security is more important than their own wellbeing.
Employees get on with the job, but reluctantly. Management feels the strain of difficulty as staff seem to become disengaged, and concepts that arise fall short of viability. Leadership, seeing only the result as the goal, continues to push management to make it happen. Management fears feeding intel up the chain regarding staff morale and performance because ultimately, it’s their job to make sure that teams are performing, and it might reflect poorly on them. They might lose their job and their handsome salary amid a global jobs crisis—eek!
For leadership, if the employees can’t make the work happen, their business is seen as a failure that ultimately rests with them. That’s a considerable, blinkering weight. The board might have some serious questions about their effectiveness as a leader, and maybe, rightly so. This fear, though, drives them only to see the end goal—the bright, shiny new product that will solve all their problems, right?
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Can you recognise what’s happening here? Can you see the pain points? Some of them are obvious, whilst others are concealed a little more under the surface.
I use Company A as an example because this is the kind of thing I’ve experienced myself and hear currently playing out in organisations. It’s vastly simplified for understanding, but it paints a picture.
At face value, we can see that there are some areas of more obvious concern:
- Workplace stressors (e.g. job loads, expectations, performance metrics)
- External stressors (e.g. financial security, joblessness concerns, the pandemic)
- Psychological stressors (e.g. increased anxiety, insecurity, personal narratives, workplace narratives)
When confronted with monumental challenges, such as a global pandemic, it’s all too easy to hone in on the things of immediate concern to us as the individual within a structure. Doing this exacerbates issues within other areas that we might be blind to due to the immediacy of our own needs. There is an interlinking of concerns, and when a system or structure (or individual) feels weight in one area, it is bound to display symptoms in others. Like the human body, it becomes unbalanced and adjusts itself to try and find balance—often in detrimental ways. In the example of Company A, this is what we see playing out.
It’s important to note here that the key to this challenge is that communication is playing a significant role in diminishing safety (real or perceived). The combination of external, internal, and psychological stressors leads to behaviours that undermine the organisation’s goals.
What’s missing is a shared conversation. What’s missing, due to the stressors, is honesty and vulnerability. Because this is missing, no one can relate and so, therefore, become isolated within the structure. This means that their actions will drive their interests and not the collective interests of the whole.
Ultimately, this leads to attrition and not necessarily attrition of personnel, but the attrition of attitudes, trust and collaborative efforts (amongst other things). With these elements eroded, there’s not a high likelihood of success, and if there is success, it didn’t have to be that difficult and take as much of a toll.
You can probably bet your bottom dollar that when things pick up again in the external environment, you’ll have valuable staff leave. And, the ones that hang in there might feel too vulnerable to do anything but tow the company line—leading to less innovation and problem-solving for the solutions you’re going to need. To turn this around, you’re going to need empathy and trust.
By embedding a safety culture around difficult conversations, you can drastically increase your understanding of blind spots and areas for improvement. Without these valuable insights, you’re flying without a compass.
If you embed a culture of transparent communication within each level of your organisation, you can help alleviate feelings of isolation. By creating a dynamic in which challenging conversations are the norm and happen up and down, you’re all able to develop the bonds of shared empathy.
In the case of Company A, if communication was two-way, both up and down, and an environment of empathy and safety existed, stressors would be shared and therefore lightened throughout the organisation. Everyone at each level would share an understanding that things were challenging, that the external environment was creating additional stress, and that this creates a psychological burden for each individual (and that’s OK and normal to feel these stressors). Just this simple act of empathy helps create unity and allows you to see your people.
Understanding the stressors created through the decision-making chain can lead to a collective effort to address them. We develop bonds that can bolster positive cultural outcomes and lead to greater freedom of expression, innovation, and collaboration through empathy. Empathy leads to better operational outputs and efficiencies for your business and helps you attract the right people for your team. Without empathy, though, those bonds can be frayed and cause friction. No one has the time to exist in structures riddled with conflict and stress, and yet we do, and to what cost?
Developing an empathic organisation is nuanced and takes time. If you’re starting an organisation from scratch, the number one thing to build is a culture of trust.
Without a culture of trust, you’re fighting an uphill battle from the get-go. Trust is way too big to go into detail here, but understand that an environment lacking trust will lack safety and, therefore, a bedrock for empathy. Trust goes both ways, and if you feel like there is a trust imbalance or lack of trust, there’s no way through it other than to sit down, get your hands dirty and dig into the core of the issue.
If you’ve got a culture of trust, you can then start to implement some of these other bedrocks that enable a culture of empathy:
- Safety—allow people to share their thoughts, feelings and personal circumstances without fear of retribution or judgement. Diverse teams lead to diverse views, leading to more inclusive solutions, problem solving and innovation. Safety also allows people to bring themselves to work without putting up barriers or facades that ultimately lead to friction. Safety values the individual within the whole.
- Listening—especially at the management and leadership levels, but across the whole organisation. Listen and ask open-ended questions that might help you gather more profound insights. Let your people know they’re heard by taking action on those insights where you can and keep them informed on the steps you said you would take.
- Vulnerability—knowing where people need help, guidance, or support will enable you to put them first. This space comes hand and hand with space for listening. Develop a culture in which people feel it is normal to ask for help or admit that they don’t have the answers—what an impossible weight to carry, the expectation of having all the answers!
We’re all human, and we all want to be understood. Understanding takes empathy, and empathy takes work. The good news is, is that empathy is something that we can all work on developing.
If you’re a manager or a leader, next time you meet with your teams, think about how you might have a conversation that facilitates building empathy and trust. If you’re a reader that isn’t in what would be typically considered a position of leadership, know that you can lead from any level and don’t be afraid to start a conversation with your manager or senior about how they’re travelling. Care is a two-way street, and we each have a role to play.
To round out this post, I’d ask you to think of the environment you work in. Could you take action to help shift towards a culture of greater empathy? Perhaps you exist in a culture of empathy—how does that make you feel? What are some of the hallmarks that enable empathy to exist? If you’ve got some insights, I’d love you to share them in the comments.
Kane Moroney 