How to Save Work with Empathy

The work is not working for many!

It tires us out and, on most days, we don’t look forward to starting the work. Self-talk takes only so far out in the day and then with reduced productivity one drags to the finish line leaving oneself with that gut wrenching feeling of not having done the best.

Work becoming drudgery is mortifying considering how much of self-worth is attached to work. Research is showing us that majority of us, despite having better means to acquire goods and buy experiences than ever in the history still find a fulfilling, sustained happiness elusive. In fact, on the contrary – mental health concerns have taken a gigantic proportion in recent times and the role of one’s work as a contributing factor is under the spotlight.

There are of course biological explanations of mental health issues. We are reading our brains better now. Knowing brain’s biochemistry has helped shape our understanding of many underlying biological causes and medicinal science has been able to provide help to millions by finding cures that were impossible to even think about till a few years back. However, we all know that it may not be nearly enough!

Many have argued that in the whole of human history we are probably living in the most peaceful of all times. One would hope that it would mean better health and more happiness; it is anything but that! No wonder, the most successful course in Yale’s 320 years history is the one on Happiness that started in 2018 ( I took it virtually and enjoyed it - check it here The Science of Well-Being).

What happened? When did we lose the plot? What has our work got to do with this? How do we fix it?

Here is what I think is happening

We Can’t Catch Up: World is changing faster than we can process it. Enough has already been said about the complexity of modern age. The digitized world where everything is only a click away, reduces the enormity of the world to a scale where the ‘smallness of just one me’ is never lost on us. Things don’t make sense in the same linear way as they probably did till 90s and I am not even talking about Blockchain, Bitcoin and String theory.

We cant make up our mind about Brexit, Income Tax , Global Warming, Immigration rules, Fashion, Vaccine, Vegan or Vitamins. Things that impact us daily, things that indisputably impact our quality of life on a regular basis. Ironically, this is happening in a period of human history when we know about anything better than we ever did.

Laissez Faire Capitalism is Dead: We messed up Capitalism. It surely lifted billions out of poverty over the last 4 centuries and felt like the most comfortable bedfellow to modern liberal democracy. So much so that most of definitive studies on history of Capitalism started only in the last few decades. It was such a smooth operator that barring a Marx here and a Mao there not many noticed!

Taking shoots in middle ages of west Europe with Agrarian capitalism to the modern-day flat world’s free markets, the journey seemed to be a natural dance of capital and labor through the crest and troughs of all socio-political waves. Capitalism grew up taking lessons from East India Companies’ adventures in far east in Indian subcontinent to further west in USA’s Boston Tea party, it served democracies and monarchies alike through the Industrial Revolution and by 20th century and esp. post world wars, became the undisputed leader of all living economic models.

But 21st century is when its being tested and its follies are exposed, and it seems underprepared.

Because, probably it is not the same capitalism anymore. There are no free markets. Many are calling it monopoly capitalism. You look at any sector and a geography- its handful of big monies controlling it all. As per dad of modern economics Adam Smith, capitalism was supposed to be a force for good (though he never used the term Capitalism himself ). It was supposed to be ethical. As?philosopher Thomas R. Wells writes [read more]-

“…But anyone who cares to read Smith’s?Wealth of Nations?for themselves will find an economics discussed and justified in explicitly moral terms, in which markets, and the division of labor they allow, are shown to both depend upon and produce not only?prosperity?but also?justice?and?freedom, particularly for the poor..”

Delivering Justice and freedom for the poor is no more the outcome. Not even the unintended by -product. On the contrary, monopoly capitalism is getting in the way of billions living a fuller, happier life. Ethical Capitalism doesn’t exist ( if it ever existed at the first place). There is no system that can keep capital in check and unchecked monopolies are enabling this mean of production to drain and exploit the remaining two – Land and Labour.

Labor is in unprecedented distress: And a large part of this is emotional! In the developed world, the nouveau riches of modern labor market came to take the baton from baby boomers and they hoped to enjoy the fruits of labor (all pun intended) forever and many did. But the world flattened, big tech arrived, big data fueled automation changed the face of labor in developed world to a gig economy worker. A new proletariat of 21st century is here. One which is not being oppressed by a bourgeois class but is oppressed nevertheless except that this time the oppression is systemic making the struggle against a faceless bourgeois soul crushing.

There are hard facts around income inequality, consolidation of wealth, wage stagnation that can highlight the labor distress easily in any market. Great minds like Paul Krugman and Amartya Sen [Amartya's critique of capitalism] have been at it for many decades and one hope that in time we move to a system that is more inclusive, level playing and happier. Yes, Marx did predict that capitalism will die eventually thanks to the revolution caused by inequality; but middle class is no proles and the poor class have no means to build a resistance as they risk losing whatever little they have. There is a more plausible theory of what may happen next. As per the famous economist Nouriel Roubini [Read Roubini]-

“…you cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That’s what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They’re not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else’s income and consumption. That’s why it’s a self-destructive process…”

There ! Now ! This is beyond redemption, hitting the rock bottom! I mean, even the polar caps are melting, and Miami will be gone in a few years. Point is – there is a desperate need to ACT ! The world needs to get its act together and we need to start by getting each other’s back and we need to teach ourselves how to do that. We need to teach ourselves empathy. Opinions are divided on how to fix capitalism, saving democracy and on plugging that hole in the Ozone layer but there is no arguing the fact that we can’t do any of that without empathizing and looking beyond ourselves. Let ‘You are not alone’ by Mavis Staples be the new world anthem [listen here]

I believe empathy can save the work too. It is saving the work for millions during the current pandemic where we saw how many organizations tweaked their policies to enable employees manage the work-life without much stress. Cynics would argue and probably accurately ascribe this as the economic compulsions of profiteering entities to survive however there are countless stories of business leaders, big and small, doing just the right thing by their people; social media has been awash with stories of empathy, understanding and kindness by managers and supervisors and we need to figure a way to institutionalize that behavior in our work places of all kinds – formal / informal , real / virtual , old/ gig.

An average modern worker is usually insanely stressed trying to navigate the complexity of the world around her. The work is an added and unavoidable ‘stressor’. She deals with two incredibly complex systems - modern life and modern work and as any complex system goes, both have many failure nodes that she must constantly manage just to keep these systems running optimally. Every large and complex system will fail at times, and that’s why we see more and more cases of ‘modern work’ not working for many. As per Mental Health America’s (MHA) Mind the Workplace 2021 report, 4 in 5 employees feel emotionally drained from their work and 9 in 10 believe that their workplace stress affects their mental health[download here].

It is likely that almost all workers, irrespective of their position in organisation are at one point or other ‘victims’ of dispassionate, humorless, monochrome culture often driven by senior leadership or by their own direct managers in specific teams. Yet, most, including senior leaders, lack self-awareness to begin the change needed despite empathy being a behavior that can be learned. In a 2021 Gartner survey of about 5000 global employees , less than half are prepared to lead the post COVID workforce that would require empathy as a critical leadership skill.

It may not seem like just yet but the future of ‘work’ will (have to !) look a lot different than the present. The interplay between capital and work must be based on deeper human traits like ‘empathy’ & ‘relationships’ than classical transactions of goods and services. Those organizations that would articulate ‘empathy’ as their core value will have an edge in retaining talent. Companies investing in teaching their leaders ‘empathy’ will thrive. It is time to add Empathy to the famous trio of?‘Inclusion, Diversity & Equity’. If these sound like presumptuous predictions, pl. look up for Prof. VS Ramachandran and his work on mirror neurons here. Forget work, empathy has been saving the world already !