When I started my first company, Lady Geek, there were very few conversations around how empathy can benefit the workplace. Yet nearly 1 in 2 people have left a previous job because they didn’t feel like they belonged, and 1 in 3 employees say they left a previous job because they had difficulty connecting with colleagues.
So, what is empathy in business? It can be defined as a company understanding its emotional impact on its staff, its customers and society. This is incredibly important for businesses. We know that employees with highly empathic leaders are much more engaged and less likely to experience burnout, while in these companies’ diversity and inclusion increase. Our own research with Harvard Business Review shows that the more empathic companies have higher growth, more earning and that they’re more productive.
In practice, a lack of empathy can take multiple forms. From a customer service perspective, it can be talking to a staff member and feeling like they aren’t listening. From a language perspective, it could be reading a company’s social media page and seeing robotic, corporate language that takes the humanity out of business. And from a leadership perspective, it looks like people feeling they don’t have a voice and not being able to speak up in meetings.
The three factors that make successful teams at work are diversity, feeling psychologically safe and a culture of empathy. There are many ways that business leaders can implement empathy. Number one is regularly taking an emotional barometer through three questions to your team: Do you feel visible? Do you feel cared for? Do you know what your purpose is?
The second thing is practising courageous conversation, which means leaning into conflict. For example, if you need to book a meeting with someone to tell them they didn’t get a promotion they applied for, let them know it’s going to be a difficult conversation beforehand. The third thing is understanding your patterns of language, which is where Artificial Intelligence can be helpful. One of my recent projects aims to bring AI and empathy together using ChatGPT to scale our empathy index. In big companies, we can tell in a matter of minutes how employees feel and how empathic the language is.
The benefit of all of this is better mental health in the workplace. This ultimately benefits the company, because the health of the business and the health of the individual are tightly linked. The second way we can think about mental health is through role modelling. One of our clients is the managing director of a tech company, and she openly says in meetings ‘At 12 o’clock I’m going to have my mental health break.’ Talking about mental health at that level helps other employees to see it as acceptable. This is also likely to reduce instances of burnout, which is now a recognised condition from the World Health Organisation. When you are emotionally exhausted at the beginning of the day, how can that be good for you or the company? Empathy isn’t just about being nice, it’s creating a better company and a better employee experience.
My takeaway advice is that we’re all a work in progress. Out of all the CEOs I’ve worked with, the ones that are really going to go far are the ones that are self-aware. Because the day you think you’re empathic enough is the day you stop being empathic.
Belinda Parmar OBE is the founder and CEO of The Empathy Business