Organizational empathy is the need of the hour

Borosil, India’s largest glass manufacturer recently announced that in the event of an employee’s unfortunate demise due to COVID-19, his or her family will continue to receive salary for the next two years. Family members will also be eligible to receive other additional benefits the employee is entitled to. More importantly children’s education till graduation will completely be covered by the firm.

At about the same time, several large organizations around the World announced significant multi-million dollar donations to help combat the pandemic. This is a very welcome step and will greatly strengthen the fight against the Pandemic.

Both are admirable initiatives, but while the first one demonstrates very strong organization empathy, the second not as much.

An incident from Satya Nadella’s book Hit Refresh probably illustrates this the best -

When he was being considered for his first role in Microsoft in 1992, his hiring manager Richard Tait gave him a problem to solve. "Imagine you see a baby lying in the street. The baby is crying. What do you do?" "You call 911," Nadella responded.

 "You need some empathy, man. Just pick up the baby," Tait gently put his arm around Nadella and said.

Empathy is the ability to share and understand each other’s emotions, to be able to put oneself in the other’s shoes and understand how that person feels. It is the ability to imagine the emotional experience of another person, their pain, joy, anger, in our heart.

So, in the Borosil example, the organization has the empathy to understand that if an employee passes away, the immediate concern for the employees’ families is being able to financially support themselves in the short term, and also being able to take care of their children’s education. This shows that the organization cares, is able to put themselves in the employees’ shoes and really understands what matters to employees. One can only imagine the impact on the rest of the employees – stronger collaboration, bonding, loyalty, improved morale etc. and assuredly it will ensure that they bounce back stronger once these difficult times are through.

In the second example of large dollar donations by corporations, they are extremely helpful in the fight against COVID-19 but they don’t directly empathize with the employees’ circumstances, they don’t directly do anything for the employee.

You could almost argue that the former is empathy, while the latter is sympathy.

Do remember, Borosil is just a small $100m turnover company whereas the revenue of some of the larger corporations runs into billions. So it should be easily possible for large corporations to take steps to help their employees' in this hour of need rather than simply donating large sums of money.

And organizations and leaders who don’t have that empathy will struggle to create a culture that will enable success. Without empathy, you cannot be a successful leader. As Theodore Roosevelt said –

 “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” 

Note: I use the example of Borosil as an illustration to make my point. This is not a reflection on Borosil or any other organization. There are a large number of other organizations who are taking significant steps for their employees’ welfare in their own distinct ways.