Making Empathy part of work

There’s an empathy deficit between what people need from their workplace and the reality they experience, says Melissa Swift in Warm Hearts, Cold Reality, in her article in MIT Management Sloan review.

‘[Gallup data] shows that only 41% of employees feel like someone cares about them at work. ?Other studies show that up to 92% of people seek out empathic organizations when looking for a job’

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This isn’t down to individual? leaders’ intentions and skills – rather a result of organisational entropy – the accumulation of processes that often go against and get in the way of our emotional needs at work.

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But the good news is that there are changes we can make, and techniques we can learn to increase empathy at work using Design Thinking and Agile approaches.

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Swift highlights an apparent contradiction.?? Traditional descriptions of business language are adversarial – dog eat dog, swimming with sharks, it’s like Lord of the Flies. Actually, these metaphors don’t tally with reality.? In the real life version of boys on a desert island in uncovered by the brilliant Rutger Bregman, the boys co-operated and helped each other.? Collaboration is deeply rooted in our collective psyche.? It’s key to our success as a species according to evolutionary psychologists, allowing us to hunt larger, more dangerous animals than we could on our own. - Ref social creatures

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The lack of empathy in our organisations is neither hard-wired nor intentional by the leadership inside them. ?Often the leaders are well intentioned for the employees (as you’d expect, based on the collaborative tendencies in most people, see above), but the overall ecosystem they operate in makes it hard to use empathy.? This is summed up under the saying: ?‘Clean fish, dirty pond’ – leaders can learn and practice all the right behaviours, but if they go back into an environment with the wrong cues (the dirty pond) then it’s hard for them to change.

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Swift highlights four strategies to build organisational empathy:

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1.??????? Use employee Personas

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This is something we frequently in Agile and Design Thinking.? Create a rich picture of the different groups who are being affected by the problem you’re working on:? their needs, their hopes and fears as well as demographic information.? While the portrait doesn’t describe an individual, it’s based on evidence you have gathered about typical members of a group.? A good Persona drives empathy:? you need to understand and appreciate somebody to be able to describe what they are thinking.?

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You can extend this into empathy maps, also user journey maps.? They take the Persona through the key steps when they experience the problem.?? This could be onboarding a new employee, or completing an annual appraisal.? As well as describing the key steps, we outline what the user is thinking, feeling and doing at each stage.?? We need to use empathy to make these points explicit.?

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2.??????? Assign Leaders to key parts of the employee experience

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This allows them to understand the part they own more deeply, and allows them to challenge them.? Some companies do this already within HR – employee experience groups with product teams covering different parts.? Swift advocates giving ownership to operational leaders, not just HR.

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3.??????? Fix Zombie Processes That Feel Rude

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Zombie processes? are the legacy of decisions taken in the past by people who aren’t in the organisation any more.?? Most of us have encountered these mind-numbing systems we have to plough through, to get expenses signed off or to register annual leave.??? They manifest a lack of empathy because they take so much of our time. They're not intuitive. Contrast your experience using the AirBnB app, which is designed with users in mind to a typical corporate ?software system. Often users are not involved and heard when the processes are designed.

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This produces ‘friction’ for employees, slowing down progress, and was mentioned in a previous article (see comments).? As the article highlighted, processes often get added to but rarely removed.? Empathy can motivate us to remove friction in processes by keeping the user and their needs in mind - how they feel about the experience, not just what they need to do.

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4.??????? Reset Norms to Enable Better Decisions on the Fly

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State and role-model empathy across the organisation, starting with leaders.? As AI automates routine tasks, tasks that only humans can do – often requiring empathy – become ever more important, according to a Capp Gemini study cited in the article.

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Empathy is one of the core principles for successful Agile teams and organisations.

? ‘We value individuals and interactions over processes and tools’

is stated clearly in the Agile manifesto of 2001.? This implies a deep interest in the people we work with and design products for.? It’s built into many of our tools and techniques – interviewing users early on and understanding their needs, asking for feedback on rough versions of products, and building psychological safety in our teams.? Users and customers are at the heart of what we do. Agile without empathy is just going through the motions - performative not transformative.

When you start to redesign your employee experience, use Agile ways of working and Design Thinking techniques. Spend time understanding what your user groups want and need. Involve them early and often. Build something they value that improves their working lives. ?

As Swift says:

‘Empathy is the first step on that long road to creating the right environment for humans at work. It’s the nod that says, “I see your humanity. I see you. You matter.”’