Empathy can improve culture and help to develop a happier, more productive team. Understanding others and treating them with empathy and compassion builds stronger, more effective relationships between co-workers, clients, and customers and is beneficial for teams and organisations.
What is empathy?
Empathy refers to the ability to recognise, understand and share others’ emotions and experiences. When you approach situations with empathy, it means that you are able to imagine yourself in someone else’s place. You can understand another person’s circumstances, even if they differ from your own. Acting and communicating with empathy allows you to develop valuable insight into someone else’s experiences and viewpoint. You may use this insight to support a team member through challenges.
Empathy is a key component of emotional intelligence and improves leadership and interpersonal relationships, making it an asset in the workplace.
Types of empathy
Empathy develops through three main stages: cognitive, emotional, and compassionate.
Cognitive empathy
Expressing cognitive empathy means you can perceive and understand how another person is feeling. This type of empathy allows you to gauge someone’s mood or emotions based on the things they say and the behaviours they display.
Cognitive empathy isn’t always something you need to act on. This stage of empathy is simply focused on observation. It is possible to notice and understand how someone is feeling without necessarily taking any action to change or influence this.
Emotional empathy
Progressing to emotional empathy means you can share another person’s emotions, understanding how they are feeling and how their experiences affect them. This stage of empathy involves you becoming emotionally invested in another person’s situation. You may feel personally affected by their circumstances or experiences, even though these things may not impact you directly.
When practising emotional empathy, you might relate a person’s perspectives or problems to your own life or simply feel and share their grief or pain. When you have emotional empathy with a co-worker, it’s important to have clear boundaries and keep an eye on your own wellbeing so you can effectively manage the feelings that accompany emotional empathy.
Compassionate empathy
Compassionate empathy is the most active stage of empathy, involving practical measures to reduce or resolve another person’s pain or improve their emotional state. Practising compassionate empathy means you do more than simply notice or share someone’s feelings. Through developing a deeper understanding, you can offer practical support or guidance to help that person overcome their challenges.
When you demonstrate compassionate empathy, you go beyond simply acknowledging someone’s hurt or challenges. Instead, helping them resolve difficulties, either on their own or with your ongoing support.
The benefits to empathy in the workplace
There are many important benefits to creating an environment that values and encourages empathy in teams. With empathy in teams and between co-workers, you can build a more inclusive and supportive organisational culture and a happy, psychologically safe work environment. Empathy can also play a valuable role in improving communication, leadership, teamwork, and productivity.
Communication
Empathy fosters clear, kind, and open communication – encouraging people to identify and help each other solve problems and build trust. Practising empathy can have a positive impact on how we communicate within teams and with customers and clients.
Leadership
When leaders have an empathetic mindset, they are often better equipped to accurately identify the needs and interests of team members, meaning that they can provide a more responsive work environment. By using empathy, leaders can be more effective and work with others to strive towards and achieve mutual goals.
Teamwork skills
Empathetic behaviour is also helpful in facilitating effective teamwork, helping staff members share emotions and experiences that influence their professional roles. This may improve team cohesion, especially in goal-setting situations.
Team members who practise empathy will naturally support one another to improve each other’s professional ability and achieve new things at work, which will also improve work quality and productivity.
Productivity
A workplace that promotes and encourages empathy is likely to be more productive. Acting with empathy means staff can identify and resolve problems quickly and efficiently, moving on to new tasks with newly learned knowledge and skills. This can facilitate smooth-running work processes and can save time, stress, and inconvenience by creating a happy, healthy team culture.
