Employing Empathy

Practice employing more Purposeful Empathy and see how it starts to change how you see your workplace.

By S.C. SAYS, (a.k.a. slam poet Andre Bradford)

When I think of the work places that I’ve been a part of that made me feel motivated, diligent and made me want to stay, there’s a pretty obvious correlation between them. It was the environments that allowed for emotional elaboration. The places where we didn’t have to check our humanness at the door. Places that cultivated empathy.

Like anyone else, I’ve had awesome jobs and jobs I couldn’t get out of fast enough. Before poetry and keynote speaking, I had a wide array of professions. Movie concessions, college summer orientation, selling cars, acting and most recently, being the sales director for the Americas (and Australia) for an Austin tech company. Two jobs bookend my workplace experiences: The undisputed worst working at a car dealership selling Acuras and the best being the tech company I eventually took a leadership role in. Fun fact, I love Acuras. My dad loves Acuras. I learned how to drive in one. They’re great cars for the money and I still love them. But it is hard for me today to imagine a place with less empathy than the dealership I worked for. It was a culture of “the customer doesn’t know what they want” and “sell at any cost.” I watched managers demean customers and coworkers openly. If anyone asked for support, or a sick day, the managers made sure everyone else knew about it, and not in a supportive way. I lasted seven months before I HAD to find something else.

My first day at the tech company was a stark contrast, not only to selling cars, but to any professional job I had before. It was a smaller startup when I joined, so we were all in a big open floor office. The first question I was asked was where my favorite place in Austin was to get breakfast tacos. My manager, Emily, frequently checked in with me about how I was adapting to the fast pace of the startup world and what, if anything, I was struggling with. I knew the names of my coworker’s kids, previous placed they’d lived, projects outside of work they were working on. Not because I was nosy (I was a little nosy), but because the company culture didn’t require us to leave our humanness at the door.

I stayed at that company for seven years.

Over drinks one day a friend of mine asked me why I was still at the tech company when I knew I could find a better paying sales director job elsewhere. I immediately thought of my time selling cars, contrasted that with my time at this tech company, and considered why there was such a stark difference. Then it clicked. The difference was empathy.

A study by Businessolver uncovered that companies that have cultivated an empathetic culture had a 90% higher chance of retaining employees. Even more telling, eight out 10 employees said they’d be willing to work longer hours for an empathetic employer. Empathy creates space for curiosity. If your team feels like they can ask you a question without being judged or berated, then growth hits a new gear. Questions that wouldn’t have ordinarily been asked get answers and projects become more streamlined. When I couldn’t remember the trick I learned in college to get an Excel spreadsheet to create graphs from data sets, I just asked Emily. She not only took the time to show me but gave me additional tools I wouldn’t have learned had I simply Googled the answer. Emily had shown me repeatedly that she leads with empathy, so I knew I could trust her to be understanding if I felt embarrassed about asking for something I felt I should already know.

Prioritizing more Purposeful Empathy and cultivating a work community that values seeing the humanity in each other helps to create work environments that don’t feel like work environments. Rather, a place where employees and coworkers can show up as their best, most curious, selves to get work done.

So how do we do that? Here are three simple ways to practice more Purposeful Empathy in the workplace.

Share something you’re looking forward to that’s not work related.

As human beings we tend to get incredibly animated about things we are frustrated by and things that excite us. We all get asked “how we’re doing” or “how our weekend was” countless times at the office. The next time you’re asked how you’re doing, share something you’re looking forward to. It could be a concert, seeing an old friend, a vacation. It doesn’t matter what it is, what matters is the emotion we as human beings use to talk about the things that excite or fire us up. It’s contagious, and it goes so much further than “my weekend was fine.”

After you’ve shared, see what they’re looking forward to this week or in the near future. You may find you have a common interest you wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

Be curious.

This is so much more than asking a coworker or employee how their weekend was. Being curious actually requires you to accept that, despite how long you’ve known someone, you don’t know everything going on in their world. Showing curiosity could look like asking a frequently stressed-out employee what specifically this week has been giving them the most trouble. It could be privately asking a co-worker who didn’t give an opinion during a meeting if there was something they wanted to share but felt they couldn’t. Or, for the braver among us, it could look like asking one our younger coworkers for a tv show, podcast or movie recommendation. Curiosity implies care and sets the stage for more authentic and empathetic interactions.

Be honest.

Obviously, this comes with the caveat of not divulging your darkest, heaviest secrets once someone asks you how your day is going. The intention is to dislodge the oversized role pleasantries have come to play in the work environment. If you’re having a tough day, saying you’re having a tough day but don’t want to elaborate on it is enough. If there’s an aspect of your job that has been frustrating you, take a breath, then express that to a coworker or manager and ask how they would handle the issue.

And most importantly, if you’re in a leadership role, be honest and vocal about your own work-related shortcomings. I once had a manager who, in our first team meeting, mentioned that he was not great at delegating and asked us to call him out if he was repeatedly trying to do things himself that he hired us to do. I can’t tell you how much respect that admission gained him from the team, and we excelled as a whole because of it.

Empathy isn’t a nicety. According to research done by the Center for Creative Leadership, empathy is vital for effective communication and teamwork. Empathy is a necessity for successful businesses to help their employees to feel valued as individuals so that they’re more inspired to work for the whole. Empathy is how you get residents to feel less like they’re coming home to their apartment and more like they’re just coming home. It’s how you gain employees that stay at your company for years despite having higher paying prospects. Practice employing more Purposeful Empathy and see how it starts to change how you see your workplace.