As a workplace consultant, I get many requests from business leaders who want their workers to be more empathic. This request nearly always displays a misunderstanding of empathy and the ways that empathy is often impeded by the workplace itself.

 

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First, what is empathy?

In my book The Art of Empathy, I define empathy this way:

Empathy is a social and emotional skill that helps you feel and understand the emotions, circumstances, intentions, thoughts, and needs of others, such that you can offer sensitive, perceptive, and appropriate communication and support.

Notice that I call empathy a skill rather than a trait. Children generally develop full-fledged empathy before the age of 3, but many things can impede empathy development. There is such a thing as trait empathy, which refers to an individual's baseline capacity for developing and utilizing empathy, but even people high in trait empathy need to learn how to skillfully empathize in difficult situations.

Notice, too, that I call empathy a social and emotional skill. This is because empathy is first and foremost a function of social and emotional awareness. There can be no empathy without emotions and emotional awareness.

What impedes empathy?

The list of things that get in the way of empathy is massive, but these 4 categories consolidate most of them:

1. Emotional Overwhelm or Dissonance: Because empathy is first and foremost an emotional skill, being in the presence of emotions that are overwhelming or forbidden (or that you don't know how to manage) can seriously impede your empathy.
2. Difference and Conflict: Even the most empathic people can lose their ability to empathize during conflicts, or in the face of significant differences. Empathy is based on trust and connection, and it can be very hard to connect to people you don't (or don't want to) understand,
3. Fatigue: We've all had the experience of losing our ability to listen to others, meet their needs, or even care when we're exhausted. Empathy can feel like a form of heavy lifting when we're not well-rested.
4. Inequality and Injustice: Systems of unequal power and oppression tend to damage empathy in both directions: The people at the top tend to lose their empathy for those below, and the people at the bottom often need to increase their empathic people-reading skills in order to remain (relatively) safe in the unequal system.

In many cases, workplaces may create social structures that are filled with one or all of these impediments to empathy. As such, asking workers to display more empathy can be a recipe for fatigue, self-silencing, and eventually, empathic burnout.

Creating an empathy-generating workplace

Asking people to display more empathy means asking them to do more labor. In order to create an empathy-generating workplace, it's important to understand which kinds of labor you're requesting.

Emotional labor is sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s concept of the work you do to display or suppress emotions (yours and others') in the context of your paid work.

Empathic labor is my concept of an extensive and multi-layered form of emotional labor that involves an understanding of emotions, empathy, relationships, social structures, and large-group social skills.

As we've all seen, highly empathic people display extensive skills. Many of these people built their skills over decades, yet high trait empathy is not always present. Often, people who become very skilled with empathy may have started out with lower trait empathy. They had to develop their empathic muscles, as it were.

But even those of us with high trait empathy have to develop and hone our empathic abilities over a lifetime. It's work, and it requires support, especially in the workplace.

Four features of healthy, empathy-generating workplaces

These following suggestions may help you support the social and emotional lives of your workers so that their innate empathy can arise in healthy and sustainable ways:

1. Reduce hierarchies wherever you can: Inequality places a tremendous burden on empathy because empathy connects people, while hierarchies divide them. Reduce the layers of power that your workers have to contend with, and their natural empathy will become more evident and less laborious for them.
2. Help people develop (and share) strong emotional vocabularies: Research is showing that developing a strong or "granular" emotional vocabulary confers stronger emotion regulation abilities — all by itself. Something about clearly articulating emotions helps people learn to work with them, which helps them develop a larger emotional (and therefore empathic) range.
3. Make sure that "backstage" areas are freely accessible: The emotional and empathic labor that people do at work is work, and it's important to provide private, backstage areas where workers can talk about what they're experiencing. Social support from people who understand what's involved in empathic labor can help workers open up about this unrecognized form of work, share strategies, deepen their work relationships, and avoid burnout.
4. Make real break areas: Rest is vital to cognition, memory, and health, but most workplaces do not provide appropriate (or any) rest areas. Empathic laborers need to get away and unwind regularly to recharge their emotional batteries.

If you have supportive structures like these, you'll create an environment where all forms of emotional and empathic labor will be more sustainable, because they will be recognized, understood, and supported properly.

If you're currently in a workplace where empathy is low, focus on the factors that impede empathy, and work to address and reduce them. At the same time, build up the empathy-generating social supports that encourage empathy.

Instead of expecting your workers to empathize without support, you can develop workplace structures that encourage and support everyone's innate empathic abilities.

Empathy is a natural human skill

We are an intensely social species, and empathy is as natural to us as breathing. However, it is work, and that work needs to be supported. If it isn't, asking workers for more empathy isn't just a bad idea; it's unempathic!