What is Employee-Level Empathy and What Can Your Company Do to Achieve it

What is Employee-Level Empathy and What Can Your Company Do to Achieve it The importance of empathy within a business context is an emerging trend. So much so, the Harvard Business Review shared the Empathy Index for businesses, which attempts to determine how empathetic your company is and whether empathy levels affect commercial success. So what do we mean by empathy at work? Empathy is the ability to experience and relate to the emotions or experiences of others. Empathy is the ability to step into someone else’s shoes, be aware of their feelings and understand their needs. In the workplace, empathy is about showing respect for employees and co-workers. It is about a company’s managers showing that they care about their employees as human beings, recognizing they have lives outside of work. In our one-on-one conversations with exceptional professionals, empathy was one of the most talked about topics. A phrase that kept coming up was “profits over people.” Employees are very sensitive to this notion. Either you are people first or you are profit first.