Profit, profitability, targets are biblical words for most organisations. When we talk about motivating, organising workplaces or streamlining procedures underneath, we are looking for answers on how to make our employees more productive. And empathy - the ability to empathise with another person's emotional state - can help. Read our post and find out what empathy is in business and how to build a company on an empathetic foundation?
Empathy - the ability to recognise needs
William Muir - an evolutionary biologist from Purdue University - took an interest in the issue.
He decided to investigate this using the example of the productivity of hens, because it is very easy to measure by the number of eggs laid. He wanted to find out what really drives some hens to be more productive than others.
So he devised an experiment in which he observed and compared two flocks:
- The first consisted of completely average hens and absolutely no interference in their lives or composition for six generations.
- He created the second group by selecting the most productive hens, the so-called Super Hens. From each generation of Super Hens he selected the further rearing of the most productive ones.
When six generations had passed, the result in each flock was as follows:
- In a flock of average hens, the birds were doing well
- All chickens were plump with beautiful feathers and egg production had increased many times over compared to the first generation flock
- In a flock of Super Hens in the sixth generation, only three Super Hens survived
- The birds that individually had the best egg-laying performance only achieved it because they suppressed the performance of the others, they simply pecked at the others
The similarity with what happens in organisations almost comes to mind.
Today, teams are often built according to the principle of a Super Herd built from Super Hens. We are taught that we need competition to succeed, that there can only be one winner. Many owners think that success is achieved by finding a superstar with the best aptitude in the company to lead it to success, giving it all the resources and total power. The result is always the same as in William Mure's experiment: aggression dysfunction and waste.
Developing empathy is developing employees
As part of team communication and employee management, it is increasingly common in companies for managers to consider what makes some groups more productive than others. In the United States, an experiment was conducted in which around 100 volunteers were gathered and divided into groups and assigned a very difficult task to solve.
It is interesting to note that the most successful groups did not include people with the highest intelligence quotient at all.
Successful teams had three characteristics:
- Firstly, their człons showed a great deal of social sensitivity, or empathy, to each other
- Speaking time was distributed equally, i.e.: no one person could dominate the discussion, nor could anyone be uninvolved
- And thirdly, the most successful groups had more women than men
Perhaps the larger number of women therefore meant that the group was more empathetic or perhaps they simply brought a more diverse way of thinking - this was not fully explained. On the other hand, the experiment definitely confirmed that empathic relationships, self-awareness and the ability to empathise with the needs of others are key.
There is no room for egocentrism here. Through attentiveness to each other and sensitivity, but also sincerity, ideas can be born, evaluate and take their final shape. Such teams do not get bogged down in impasses and wander for less time.
Empathy versus compassion
To answer the question of whether empathy will be useful in business it is worth straightening out a few concepts. First, it's time to make mistakes.
The 4 mistakes in understanding empathy are:
1. empathy is not submissiveness
I sometimes hear from managers "I'm too empathetic because I don't know how to say no to my employees.". The difficulty in saying no and protecting one's objectives is submissiveness, but if the manager says "I am too submissive to my employees". It is difficult to regard such an opinion about oneself as something positive. Empathy is the ability to understand other people's emotional states, rather than accepting everything that happens around you. In business, you cannot afford to condone inefficiency.
2. empathy has nothing to do with sympathy or antipathy
I may like someone and at the same time find it difficult to be empathetic because, for example, he or she is excessively self-centred. I can also dislike an employee and yet be able to take into account their perspective of their needs and emotions. Empathy is an offshoot of cognitive development.
3. empathy is not syntony
Syntonia is a term that comes from psychology and means the emotional fusion of two people as if 'infecting' each other with someone else's emotions, in which case we experience someone else's emotions as strongly as if they were our own, although this is not true. In the long term, it leads us to exhaustion and fatigue
4. empathy does not in any way involve admitting being right or disagreeing with someone's opinion or view
An employee comes to me - a month after I introduced the company's way of reporting through the CRM system - with a firm voice saying that he won't fill in moronic reports because it's a waste of time.
I can aggressively say that he's not going to tell me what he's going to do and what he's not going to do, I'm the boss here, and if he doesn't like it, he can fire himself or refer to his situation: "listen, I understand that the transition from Word to the new system is uncomfortable. I hear you don't feel like it. I want to tell you that I'm not going to give up on the idea [because I'm convinced that we should be collecting and storing client information in this way], let's talk about what's so particularly difficult for you about this reporting..."
And if you want to learn how to wield your emotions when dealing with people, I invite you to read the e-book: With eMOTIONS to the people
Empathy in business - the ability to adopt their way of thinking
Empathy is our normal biological equipment. It has been studied that every c1TP1Person has so-called mirror neurons, which help to emotionally and intellectually connect with the other person. It is, therefore, the ability to take on the other party's perspective, to hear how they are thinking about a situation and what they are feeling in that situation.
In business, this means truly understanding and responding to the needs of both employees and customers. Research into employee performance and the effectiveness of procedures shows that this is the latest key to building a network of loyal customers and engaged employees.
Organisational transactional analysis: building empathic relationships in the work environment
Organisational transactional analysis offers a unique approach to understanding and managing relationships in business, taking into account both the needs of individuals and group dynamics. A key element in organisations is the exchange of signs of recognition - units of attention that foster a sense of belonging and appreciation. Introducing empathy as a foundation in management allows not only a better understanding of employees' emotions and needs, but also the elimination of negative interaction patterns such as unconscious psychological games or destructive rivalries.
Organisational transactional analysis helps to identify these patterns and introduce practices that support positive exchanges, such as open communication, fair sharing of responsibility and creating spaces for dialogue. As a result, organisations can develop a more supportive work environment in which empathetic relationships become key to engagement, collaboration and innovation.
Where do companies use empathy? And what does cognitive empathy, emotional empathy do to understand the customer's world?
In modern business, one of the most important battles is the battle for customers. A company with a large number of loyal customers gains a high position in the market. So what can you do to attract customers? Quality, branding and modern technology are great assets, but the most important thing is to understand what the customer is thinking when choosing a particular product. Knowing the customer's mindset is the key to presenting them with the best offer and convincing them to engage with our company.
Today, more and more companies are using tools to help them understand their customers' world in order to tailor their goods and services to them. Various tools are used for this, such as the Disgn Thinking method and within it, for example, the Empathy Map or the 5 questions If I were my own customer
Describing these areas in detail would require a separate article, but I will write in the interest of heartening that I have already worked with Polish companies that use empathy both to create jobs, to facilitate communication in teams and to design their products and services. This is simply already happening in Poland.
Empathy can be learned - FIKA, or how to build an empathetic company?
Mutual help flowing from empathy towards each other is absolutely fundamental to the success of teams and companies. It produces better results than the high intelligence of individual employees. It is not technology that determines efficiency, but the ability to use the resources of the people who work in a company.
To be effective in a company, you need to know the people you are working with in order to find a solution quickly. This sounds trivial and everyone thinks it happens naturally, but it doesn't. You need time and space to get to know each other. When people are too focused only on their own work, they don't know what's going on with someone sitting at the desk next to them, the potential of the organisation is wasted.
There are companies that have banned coffee at their desks so that people meet at coffee machines or in social areas and talk to each other. So it's not about alcoholic team-building events, but opportunities to talk to each other, to get to know each other better. The Swedes have even coined the term FIKA for this, which means not just drinking coffee together during breaks but simply spending time with each other.
Empathy - the way to a better company - summary
Is this emphasis on empathic relationships a new fashion? On the contrary it is the use of very old biological mechanisms. When work becomes more challenging, when people are expected to achieve great things, they need to know who to turn to for help, to receive it and to know how to use it. So they need empathy so that they can bring out their full potential.
