It’s certainly becoming increasingly more important for companies to embrace the role of empathy at work, creating positive working environments to drive businesses forward with connection and innovation. Let’s consider the many layers to empathy at work:
Leading with empathy
To truly embed the culture of empathy all leaders must be fully on board. They must have the right leadership, communication skills, interviewing and people management skills plus the capability to identify empathy related skills for their team’s development too.
Fostering empathy within your team
As we evolve as teams in a post-pandemic world, there is a definite need for a range of soft skills, encouraging us to work together with empathy. Communication, mediation and behavioural skills are sought after by many businesses looking to create harmonious teams. Wellbeing, inclusion and diversity learning programmes are also integral to fostering empathy in the workplace.
Empathise with your consumers
Strive to understand and listen to your consumers more. Make empathy part of your brand. Consumers constantly evolve and even more so since the Covid-19 pandemic, in the way they consume information and the way they feel about brands they consume.
Companies look to learn about design thinking as part of their business processes, considering empathy in gaining deeper consumer insight to create relevant products and services.
Empathy and technology
The advance of technology means companies must keep on top of their technical skills. However, this also brings a stronger shift to soft skills development as some functions are replaced by technology such as AI and machine learning and the consequence this brings.
Empathetic L&D
Last but certainly not least we must mention your leading L&D functions that are integral to developing all the skills relating to empathy across the entire business. It’s fair to say that empathy and L&D are like peas in a pod when it comes to listening and understanding people’s development needs.
Future of empathy in the workplace
We’d say ’empathy at work’ is here to stay, an absolute must for 2022 and beyond.
What does your company need to successfully lead forward with empathy?
