Empathy at Work

Chapter 1. What Is Empathy?

Empathy (noun) em•pa•thy

 the ability to understand or share the feelings of another person.

Psychologists and counselors agree that a person requires three specific skills to have true empathy: “the ability to share another person’s feelings; the cognitive ability to perceive what another person is feeling; and a ‘socially beneficial’ intention to respond compassionately to that person’s distress.”¹ There have been many studies conducted on why empathy is so beneficial to the human experience. The overarching conclusion by researchers is that empathy promotes moral reasoning, motivates prosocial behavior, and inhibits aggression toward others.²

To better understand what empathy is, we first must understand the different types of empathy and how we experience each of those types when we are in different situations. There are three types of empathy: emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, and empathetic concern. Each of these plays a vital role in the way in which we interact with others.

Emotional Empathy

Emotional empathy, which is also called affective empathy or primitive empathy, is empathy that we have inherently. Emotional empathy is very closely connected to something called emotional contagion: having one person’s emotions or behavior mimicked in another person’s emotions or behaviors. It is seeing another person smiling and then beginning to smile yourself; seeing someone frowning and feeling a bit sad; or hearing someone speak angrily with a tense and raised voice, and becoming angry yourself.

As humans we engage in emotional empathy constantly, so this is already something that happens quite frequently in any company. Every team has a personality; some are known as fun and engaged, whereas others are known for being more serious and task oriented. These qualities are manifestations of emotional empathy and emotional contagion. If the leader in a group is known as someone that likes to make jokes, have a little fun on the job, and be a very upbeat personality, others tend to follow their lead. The opposite is also true for leaders who set more negative tones for their teams. Because it is so closely tied to the people who surround us on a daily basis, emotional empathy plays a major role in how we feel throughout the day.

Cognitive Empathy

Cognitive empathy, also known as perspective taking, is the type of empathy that requires work. When we are speaking about having empathy, we are generally speaking about cognitive empathy. It is, according to Hodges and Myers in the Encyclopedia of Social Psychology,³ having “more complete and accurate knowledge about the contents of another person’s mind, including how the person feels.” This type of empathy happens when we are actively engaged in finding perspective to better understand a situation.

Cognitive empathy is where many people begin to get into trouble. It’s easy to have empathy for people we identify as “like us”—immediate family members; very close friends; those with whom we work closely; and people with whom we deeply identify, even if we aren’t particularly close to them. We tend to defend those people even if they’re wrong, and we are generally predisposed to give them the benefit of the doubt. That’s because there’s a baseline of understanding: we feel we know so much about them that we have a wealth of perspective on why they do the things they do. Therefore, we can cognitively—and actively—have empathy for them without much convincing.

The problems start when we encounter people who aren’t like us. Consider the last time you disagreed with someone on a topic that was very important to you. Did you have a civilized debate that ended in both sides saying they felt enlightened with a new point of view? If you did, wonderful! You have mastered empathy. If not, you are in the majority. It is difficult for people to have empathy for those with whom they don’t identify; there is no baseline of perspective, therefore the other person seems foreign and is perceived as a threat. What do we do when we feel threatened? We defend. Cognitive empathy is why it’s difficult to “agree to disagree.”

Empathic Concern

Some people are cynical about empathy. Some feel that much of empathy is self-serving; if we show the other person we care about their feelings for a few minutes, they will give us what we want. And for some, empathy is a means to an end. They use it to manipulate a situation in their favor; if the other person benefits from being shown empathy, that’s just icing on the cake. But there is a third type of empathy that is entirely outward facing, and it focuses on the well-being of others at zero tangible benefit to the empathizer: empathic concern.

Empathic concern is defined as an emotional reaction characterized by such feelings as compassion, tenderness, softheartedness, and sympathy.⁴ To put it another way, empathic concern is an other-oriented emotion evoked by perceiving someone in need. A great example of empathic concern is when we see someone who is physically harmed and in desperate need of assistance. We stop what we are doing immediately, run to their aid, and call the necessary parties who can help this person.

Cognitive empathy and empathic concern often seem indistinguishable, but they are actually quite different. Where empathic concern is a deeply emotional experience, Hodges and Myers⁵ argue that whereas emphatic empathy is an automatic reaction, cognitive empathy requires a good amount of skill. You need to be observant of a person’s behaviors and how they react in varying situations, and you must be diligent in keeping track of their emotional responses. When the time comes and you need to have a better understanding of what a person is feeling, you can use that knowledge to better assess a given situation.

Empathy and Corporate Culture

Maintaining a positive and productive work environment is most easily achieved when everyone on the team knows their role, understands how their role fits in the bigger picture, and can competently complete all the duties associated with that role. If all three of these basic tenets are universally met, issues will never occur, and company culture will rarely dip below the optimal level. However, these three tenets are rarely met universally. New hires come in and take a while to be onboarded. Teams experience turnover because of layoffs or members leaving for better opportunities. Individuals are promoted to new roles or move laterally to other teams and departments. Someone might be just coming back into the fold after taking an extended leave of absence for a sickness, parental duties, or a family emergency. There is always at least one person who isn’t on completely solid footing in their role for one reason or another.

That is the nature of business and work in general; very few companies will ever operate at that optimal level because their employees will rarely all be completely secure in their roles at the same time. This is why culture is such a hot topic. Leaders want to create an environment that is going to uphold a certain level of success in spite of the fact that not everyone will always feel comfortable and confident in the system. But what is culture, really? And how does the culture you create relate to empathy at work?

Culture

Harvard Business Review (HBR) defines corporate culture in two distinct ways: cognitively and emotionally.⁶ It defines cognitive culture as the shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions that serve as a guide for the group to thrive. Put another way, cognitive culture is what the company deems important. How each employee behaves in the office, how people treat one another, core values, and general company directives all fall under the cognitive cultural umbrella.

Emotional culture, on the other hand, is what HBR defines as the shared affective values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions that govern which emotions people have and express at work and which ones they are better off suppressing. Where cognitive culture is more clearly defined and articulated, emotional culture is a result of the nonverbal cues we pick up on: body language, facial expressions, paralinguistics, and the like.

These two different types of culture are both prevalent in every office, even if one or both of them aren’t always addressed. The big things define your culture; the little things create your culture. The big things that define your culture are the results of the small, everyday actions that feed into the larger cultural experience. This is where empathy comes into play. Empathy—or a lack thereof—will drive what those small, everyday actions are and their effect on your team. If empathy is the cornerstone of your company’s values, culture takes care of itself.

Corporate Empathy

There’s a reason why we must talk about culture before we can dive into empathy. Like we discussed, culture is the result of everyday actions by every single person in a company. To truly define corporate empathy, we must first define what a company values at its core and how it plans on achieving those values. There are, however, a few things that we can assume across the board:

• First, empathy requires open lines of communication. Everyone feels that they can speak their mind, therefore everyone feels heard.

• Second, empathy requires a certain level of respect. When we are speaking to others, we expect to be listened to and our opinion to be sincerely considered. For those two things to happen, everyone must approach situations with a baseline of respect.

• Finally, everyone needs to be fully engaged in the culture. This means that every person in the company must engage in the actions that create a culture of empathy.

This brings us back to culture. If you look closely, you’ll see that both of the definitions HBR uses for culture center on the same general point: the experience that people have when they interact with your team or company. Cognitive culture is what companies explicitly define as what’s important to them, whereas emotional culture is the actual experience people have when they deal with your company. With that in mind, let’s define corporate empathy:

Corporate empathy is the state of the emotional culture of a company and how it relates to the cognitive culture of the company.

Corporate empathy is the system each organization has in place that allows every individual within that organization to feel heard, respected, and engaged. It sits at the intersection of what companies define as their culture (aka cognitive culture) and what that culture actually is at the company (aka emotional culture). If both of those types of culture are aligned, corporate empathy is thriving. If not, something needs to change to make the environment better for every worker.

What Studies Say About How Employers and Employees Feel About Empathy

Several studies have been done on the effect empathy has on revenue, leadership, and the general overall environment in offices. It’s no surprise that companies that place a higher value on empathy are more successful than those that do not. But what these studies have highlighted are the differences in how various demographic groups feel that empathy plays a specific role in that success.

According to benefits administration technology company Businessolver’s 2018 State of Workplace Empathy study, ⁷ only 31 percent of women view organizations as a whole as empathetic. For men, that number was much higher: 71 percent. Additionally, men are 15 percent more likely than women to believe that their organization is empathetic. If you think about these numbers and what they mean beyond just empathy, they actually make a lot of sense.

Many writers and researchers have argued that the way organizations are designed put women at a disadvantage. Women only make up four percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. They are notoriously paid less than their male counterparts. And a 2014 study by Slater & Gordon found that more than 40 percent of managers surveyed are hesitant to hire women in their twenties and thirties to avoid dealing with maternity leave.⁸ Further, one-third of managers felt that when those women came back to the office they were not as good at their jobs as they had been before leaving.

The reason so many women feel that companies as a whole do not display empathy is because they are not shown as much empathy, on both a macro level as well as a day-to-day one, as their male counterparts. And these differences of opinion on how people within the company view empathy extends beyond just the gender gap. As every single person in every single company has a slightly different perspective on what’s happening, those differing views have proven to be vital in how management approaches empathy.

For instance, in that same BusinessSolver study, 87 percent of CEOs surveyed felt that a company’s financial performance was directly tied to empathy in the workplace. However, 92 percent of employees surveyed felt that empathy remains undervalued, a seven percent increase from 2017. Although it’s clear that everyone views empathy as vital to company success, studies suggest that not everyone can agree on how to display that empathy in the workplace.

Empathy Is Learned, Not Innate

Research revealing that empathy is important isn’t terribly surprising. What is interesting is what researchers are saying about engaging empathy: how we approach it and where it comes from. Researchers at the University of Cambridge worked with genetics company 23andMe to determine what, if any, the link is between empathy and genetics.⁹ The study consisted of more than 46,000 participants who self-measured their empathy quotient (EQ), and the researchers then compared the EQ scores to 23andMe’s genetic data. They determined that genetics do, in fact, have a role in the way we empathize with others. However, that role is very small; the research found that around “10 percent of the variation between people’s compassion and understanding is down to genes.” In short, we are largely in control of the way we recognize and respond to other people’s needs and feelings.

Cognitive empathy is innate, but that kind of empathy isn’t the one we refer to when we talk about engaging empathy. Empathic concern and emotional empathy are the types of empathy we learn. Research has shown that we begin to learn emotional empathy as early as 12 months old; at that age, infants begin to comfort others who are in distress. By 14 to 16 months, children have already started displaying spontaneous helping behavior.¹⁰

The takeaway here is that some of our empathy is built in to our brains. But the vast majority of the empathy we show and experience throughout our lives derives from learned behaviors. And if we can enact those learned behaviors on a personal level, we can definitely engage in those same behaviors at work.

The Habits of Empathetic Companies

The 2016 HBR article cited earlier asserts that “the most deeply entrenched elements of organizational culture are the least visible”—in other words, the negative behaviors considered standard in order to make a team successful. One of their examples is managers pitting employees against one another in order to get everyone on the team to level up. The article’s authors, Sigal Barsade and Olivia A. O’Neill, point out that even cultures of love or fun could also create problems; people might be afraid to confront issues head on because they don’t want to impede the overarching positive culture.

These all-in cultures of one main emotion highlight why empathy is so important in corporate environments. I fully endorse a culture of joy or happiness or love, but there also needs to be some sort of system in place that allows for honesty and reality, no matter how painful. The most empathetic companies already know this to be true: they recognize that teams are made up of humans, not robots, so emotions ebb and flow. They understand that there must be room for humanity—for empathy—within their culture. And those companies all share certain qualities.

Transparency Is Prioritized

Companies that value transparency are notorious for their happy work environments and highly engaged teams. According to a 2014 American Psychological Association survey of 1,562 workers in the United States,¹¹ one in three respondents felt their companies were dishonest with them. Only half of respondents felt their companies were open with them about what was happening with the company.

This isn’t a problem at Buffer. The social media management software company made the decision to publicly disclose everyone’s salaries in 2013, and the results of that transparency have been positive. On their blog, they have noted trust and innovation as two benefits, but they have also said that transparency keeps everyone open to feedback and leads to greater justice. Transparent companies have nothing to hide, and they feel their employees should take the same approach with both their work and their teammates.

Everyone Feels Heard

Companies that value empathy give their workers a platform to be heard. Those businesses understand that giving their workers that platform doesn’t tip the balance of power away from upper management; it shows employees that management genuinely cares about their day-to-day experience in the building.

Whole Foods is known as one of the most empathetic companies in the world and is consistently ranked by Fortune as one of the best places to work. One of the reasons why is its unique hiring process: the company believes that every new hire should be vetted internally, so each potential team member goes through a 60-day hiring process during which they are interviewed by managers, recruiters, and select employees. The candidate is then placed on a team for 60 days on a trial basis. After the trial is up, the entire team votes on whether to bring the person in on a permanent basis.

This team-focused approach to hiring is incredibly empathetic because it gives those who are most affected by this decision—the employees on the team—a major deciding voice in what happens. That builds trust and makes the environment in the office much more pleasant.

Open Lines of Communication

A culture of transparency and everyone feeling heard also creates open lines of communication. A 2012 Salesforce.com study¹² said that 86 percent of executives blamed workplace failures on lack of collaboration and poor communication. If people can’t communicate with one another, collaboration is nearly impossible. Empathetic companies recognize the dangers of bad communication, so they take an active role in avoiding the pitfalls.

Credit Karma’s founder and CEO Kenneth Lin has an open-door policy. He knows that as companies grow bigger, the C-suite and upper management can become quite detached from the day-to-day operations. That’s why he encourages everyone in the company to stop by his office and share how they’re feeling about what Credit Karma is doing. Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, takes a similar approach. It records every meeting and makes those recordings available to all employees. Founder, chairman, and co-chief investment officer Ray Dalio values independent thinking and debate above everything else; he feels that transparency leads to improvement because it forces people to put their egos aside, confront their weaknesses, and explore their mistakes.

Being able to communicate freely puts companies at an advantage. When it’s okay to make a mistake, think outside the box, and respectfully speak your mind, everyone feels heard and valued. In short, everyone wins. Understanding the nuances of how empathy works in corporate culture is incredibly valuable because it will be a defining factor in how you approach situations at work. Communication is central to that approach.

Now that you have a better understanding of those nuances, let’s talk about how you can make sure you’re implementing this approach in your own communications at work.

¹ E. Hatfield, R. L. Rapson, and Y.-C. L. Le, “Emotional Contagion and Empathy,” In Social Neuroscience. The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, edited by J. Decety and W. Ickes, 19–30. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. http://bit.ly/2XX0ZEq.

² J. Decety, and C. Lamm, “Human Empathy through the Lens of Social Neuroscience,” The Scientific World Journal, 6 (2006), 1146–1163. http://bit.ly/2Fb5jISf.

³ S. D. Hodges and M. W. Myers, “Empathy,” in Encyclopedia of Social Psychology, edited by R. F. Baumeister and K. D. Vohs (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007: 296–298.

⁴ Decety and Lamm, “Human Empathy through the Lens of Social Neuroscience,” 1146–1163.

⁵ Hodges and Myers, “Empathy,” 296–298.

⁶ S. Barsade and O. A. O’Neill, “Manage Your Emotional Culture,” Harvard Business Review (Jan.-Feb. 2016): 58–66. https://bit.ly/2JaziVj.

⁷ “2018 State of Workplace Empathy,” Businessolver.com, Inc., 2018, https://bit.ly/2HkGsEC.

⁸ “Working Mothers’ Careers ‘Derailed’ after Becoming Pregnant,” Slater & Gordon Lawyers, August 12, 2014, https://bit.ly/2T5RaAu.

⁹ V. Warrier et al., “Genome-Wide Analyses of Self-Reported Empathy: Correlations with Autism, Schizophrenia, and Anorexia Nervosa.” Translational Psychiatry, no. 8 (2018), https://go.nature.com/2F3Ie9K.

¹⁰ J. Decety, “The Neurodevelopment of Empathy in Humans,” Developmental Neuroscience, no. 32 (2010), https://bit.ly/2O3jT86.

¹¹ “2014 Work and Well-Being Survey,” American Psychological Association, 2014, http://bit/ly/2VTlKiu.

¹² “Is Poor Collaboration Killing Your Company?” Salesforce.com, 2012, https://sforce.co/2UzNVCF.