Article
9 minutes
Examples of Empathy in the Workplace (And How to Foster It)
Global HR
Author
Lorelei Trisca
Published
July 31, 2024
Last Update
August 12, 2024
Table of Contents
Examples of empathy toward coworkers
Examples of empathy toward direct reports
Examples of empathy toward customers
Examples of empathy towards interns, junior employees, and mentees
How to effectively foster empathy in your workplace
Foster empathy in your workplace with Deel Engage
Key takeaways
- Practicing empathy facilitates better teamwork by fostering understanding, trust, and open communication among team members.
- A lack of empathy can reduce team morale, affect employees’ mental health, and decrease productivity and turnover.
- To show empathy towards colleagues, practice active listening, acknowledge feelings, and provide support.
Understanding and demonstrating empathy in professional settings is crucial for cultivating a harmonious and productive work environment.
This blog post will explore examples of empathy in the workplace—toward colleagues, direct reports, customers, and junior employees. We also included actionable steps and initiatives to encourage empathy within teams.
Examples of empathy toward coworkers
Offering assistance during work overload: A team member notices a coworker is overwhelmed with tasks and offers to help with some of their workload.
Active listening during discussions: Colleagues listen respectfully and actively during meetings, ensuring everyone can share their thoughts and ideas.
Providing support during personal hardships: A coworker empathizes with a colleague going through a personal crisis by offering emotional support or suggesting flexible work arrangements.
Celebrating achievements together: Team members recognize and celebrate each other’s accomplishments, fostering a supportive and positive work environment.
Sharing resources and knowledge: A colleague shares helpful resources or insights with a coworker to assist with a challenging project.
Checking in on well-being: Regularly asking coworkers how they are feeling and if they need any support, especially during stressful periods.
Acknowledging efforts and contributions: Recognizing and appreciating coworkers’ hard work and contributions in team meetings or through thank-you notes.
Respecting different working styles: Understanding and accommodating team members’ diverse working styles and preferences.
Supporting career development: Helping a coworker identify opportunities for growth and providing mentorship or guidance.
Being patient and understanding: Demonstrating patience and understanding when a coworker makes a mistake or is learning a new skill.
Deel Engage
Examples of empathy toward direct reports
Personal check-ins: A manager regularly checks in with their team members to understand their well-being and any challenges they might face.
Providing development opportunities: A manager identifies their direct reports’ strengths and career aspirations and provides relevant training and development opportunities.
Flexible work arrangements: Understanding the need for work-life balance, a manager offers flexible working hours or remote work options to accommodate personal commitments.
Constructive feedback: Managers provide constructive feedback with empathy, focusing on development and growth rather than solely on performance shortcomings.
Recognizing achievements: Managers publicly acknowledge and celebrate team members’ accomplishments.
Supporting work-life balance: Managers encourage team members to take breaks and manage their workload to prevent burnout.
Listening to concerns: Creating an open-door policy where team members feel comfortable sharing their concerns and suggestions.
Involving in decision-making: Involving direct reports in decision-making to make them feel valued and heard.
Providing resources: Ensuring team members have the necessary resources and support to perform their job effectively.
Offering mentorship: Guiding team members through career development with regular mentorship and coaching sessions.
Examples of empathy toward customers
Understanding customer pain points: Customer service representatives listen actively to customer complaints and concerns, showing understanding and a willingness to help resolve issues.
Personalized solutions: Sales and support teams offer personalized solutions to meet customer needs, demonstrating that they value and understand each customer’s unique situation.
Proactive communication: Proactively informing customers about changes, delays, or issues shows empathy and respect for their time and expectations.
Apologizing for mistakes: Sincerely apologizing when making a mistake and taking immediate steps to rectify the situation.
Showing appreciation: Thanking customers for their business and loyalty through personalized messages or special offers.
Offering additional support: Providing extra assistance or resources to customers struggling with a product or service.
Recognizing special occasions: Acknowledging customers’ birthdays or anniversaries with personalized messages or discounts.
Being patient: Taking the time to thoroughly explain solutions and answer questions, ensuring customers fully understand.
Accommodating special needs: Being attentive to and accommodating any special needs or requests customers may have.
Examples of empathy towards interns, junior employees, and mentees
Providing guidance and mentorship: Senior employees and managers offer guidance and mentorship to interns and junior employees, helping them navigate their new roles and responsibilities.
Encouraging questions: Creating an environment where interns and junior employees feel comfortable asking questions and seeking clarification without fear of judgment.
Offering constructive feedback: Providing feedback that is both constructive and supportive, focusing on helping interns and junior employees develop their skills and confidence.
Inclusion in team activities: Ensuring interns and junior employees participate in team meetings, social events, and discussions to help them feel valued and integrated into the team.
Recognizing contributions: Acknowledging the efforts and contributions of interns and junior employees publicly.
Providing learning opportunities: Offering opportunities for interns and junior employees to learn new skills and take on challenging tasks.
Supporting career development: Helping interns and junior employees identify their career goals and providing resources to achieve them.
Being patient and understanding: Demonstrating patience and understanding as interns and junior employees learn and grow in their roles.
Building confidence: Encouraging and supporting interns and junior employees to take on new challenges and responsibilities.
Offering emotional support: Being available to listen to and support interns and junior employees experiencing stress or uncertainty in their new roles.
Career Management
How to effectively foster empathy in your workplace
1. Develop a culture of empathy
Creating a culture of empathy involves fostering an environment where employees feel valued and understood. Prioritizing empathy improves workplace dynamics and enhances employee engagement.
Example strategies:
- Encourage open communication where employees feel safe sharing their concerns and challenges
- Train managers to actively listen and respond to employees’ needs
- Recognize and celebrate empathetic behaviors within the organization
2. Encourage team development
Encouraging team development helps build connections among team members. By fostering meaningful interactions, employees can better understand and support each other.
Example strategies:
- Implement programs that facilitate regular team interactions, such as virtual coffee breaks or team-building exercises
- Use platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams to set up casual meetups and meaningful conversations
- Provide structured opportunities for team members to share personal experiences and challenges
3. Organize virtual social events
Virtual social events can help remote teams bond and foster a sense of camaraderie. These events offer a relaxed setting for employees to interact and get to know each other better.
Example strategies:
- Host virtual happy hours with icebreakers and games
- Organize remote cooking classes or other engaging activities
- Share fun stories and encourage team members to talk about their hobbies and interests
4. Make communication easy and inclusive
Effective communication is key to fostering empathy, especially in remote or hybrid work environments. Ensure that all team members feel included and have access to communication channels.
Example strategies:
- Hold regular team meetings that include remote and in-office employees
- Use asynchronous communication to accommodate different time zones and schedules
- Pay attention to non-verbal cues during virtual meetings and follow up with employees who seem disengaged or stressed
5. Support managers in leading with empathy
Managers play a crucial role in fostering empathy within their teams. Equip them with the skills and tools they need to lead effectively across diverse teams.
Example strategies:
- Provide training on cultural intelligence and empathetic leadership
- Encourage managers to get to know their team members personally and understand their motivations
- Offer resources and support for managers to address the unique challenges of leading a diverse and remote workforce
By implementing these strategies, organizations can foster a culture of empathy that enhances employee well-being, improves communication, and drives overall organizational success.
Foster empathy in your workplace with Deel Engage
Organizations should show their employees that they are valued in order to foster a healthy work culture. A comprehensive talent management system like Deel Engage connects and enables your employees:
- Onboarding workflows take newcomers by the hand and lead them to full integration and productivity
- Career development frameworks create role clarity and guide people along their development path
- Connection programs foster belonging and connection even remotely
- Training programs deliver engaging content instead of overwhelming learners
- Pulse surveys to ensure everyone’s voice is heard
- Feedback and performance reviews highlight employee strengths and facilitate development
Additionally, Deel HR, our truly global HRIS solution, is always included for free.
Book a demo to see how our solutions will help you build an empathetic and growth-oriented workforce.
FAQs
What does empathy in the workplace mean?
Empathy is more than expecting your employees to put themselves in their colleagues’ shoes and understand their perspectives. It is something that needs to be built with patience.
You need to encourage your people to recognize one another’s emotions and feelings and gain insights into their moods. This way, they will feel motivated to support each other during conflicts or challenging times,
Empathy in the workplace is the ability to consider and understand your colleague’s or team member’s perspective. When you (as an employee) show empathy, it means you understand what it feels like to walk in another person’s shoes, gain a sense of their experience and the feelings they might be having, and support them through challenging situations.
Empathy isn’t the same as sympathy. Sympathy is the feeling of sorrow, concern, and pity for someone. On the other hand, empathy means having a shared perspective of someone else’s emotions.
For example, employees can feel sympathetic toward their colleague’s loss without getting too involved. Empathy is when an employee notices a new hire struggling with a task, understands the situation, and offers to guide them.
What are the different types of empathy?
There are three major categories: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and compassionate empathy.
Cognitive empathy
Cognitive empathy involves understanding how the mind of another person functions. It doesn’t require any emotional engagement on the part of the observer, but it’s rather somewhat like understanding what the other person might be thinking.
For example, managers use cognitive empathy to better understand their team members' feelings. This helps them to tailor their leadership style to inspire their teams on any given day. Similarly, sales executives can use it to gauge a customer’s mood and use that information to determine how best to proceed.
Emotional empathy
Imagine finding someone crying in a public place, such as a restaurant, or sitting close to a friend as they cry. They cry while talking to you and share their pain with you. The more you observe their facial expressions and hear their voices’ choked, tremulous sounds, the more likely you are to begin to feel all the same emotions as them.
You feel sad as they show their sadness, which makes you want to comfort them through words, actions, and gestures. In this case, our brain has shifted from the cognitive perspective into one that shares the emotional experience. This is why emotional empathy is sometimes referred to as “affective empathy”—it affects or changes you. It’s about knowing how someone feels and creating genuine rapport with them as they battle their current emotions.
Social psychology researchers Hodges and Myers divided emotional empathy into three components:
- Feeling the same emotion as the other person, also referred to as emotional contagion or “catching” someone else’s tears
- Feeling distressed in response to the other person’s pain
- Feeling compassion for another person, also referred to as empathetic concern
Emotionally empathetic people are sensitive and often hurt by other people’s pain. Dealing with other people’s problems head-on is already challenging for them, so if these problems aren’t resolved, it affects their mental health, too.
Compassionate empathy
Compassionate empathy involves sharing another person’s emotional pain and taking practical steps to reduce it while simultaneously having concern for that person.
For example, imagine one of your team members is very upset or angry because they recently lost a potential client due to a mistake. Showing support can go a long way to help them through the situation and inspire them to perform better the next time around.
Can one learn empathy?
Is empathy genetic? The answer is yes. Research shows genetics influence the ability to practice empathy. Scientists found variations in two genes—CNTNAP2 and NTRK2—which could account for an individual’s ability to read and respond to social cues more accurately.
For those who aren’t genetically empathetic, potential barriers to feeling empathy could be:
- One’s upbringing
- Treatment from others when having emotional issues
- Messages received about the value of expressing emotions
- Fear of becoming overwhelmed or being perceived in a certain way
Irrespective of these, empathy skills are teachable. While some people have a natural gift for emotional intelligence and empathy, acquiring these skills is possible.
Just like how people learn a new behavior or skill, they can learn empathy by implementing a cycle of instructions, modeling, rehearsing, and receiving feedback.
The more one understands another person’s emotional state, the better one will be able to respond.
About the author
Lorelei Trisca is a content marketing manager passionate about everything AI and the future of work. She is always on the hunt for the latest HR trends, fresh statistics, and academic and real-life best practices. She aims to spread the word about creating better employee experiences and helping others grow in their careers.
