The Simple Skill Everyone Needs in the Post-Covid Office

Whether you’re a CEO or low-level employee, everyone wants to feel safe and heard in the workplace. And with so much still up in the air about how businesses will operate in a post-Covid world, we wanted to know: what’s the most important factor that all companies need to consider as they reopen?

According to Cydney Roach, Global Chair of Employee Experience at Edelman and Professor Jamil Zaki, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, the answer is empathy. The two recently co-authored an ebook (which is available to download for free!) called Leading With Empathy In Turbulent Times: A Practical Guide. We spoke with Roach about what empathy looks like in the workplace (apparently it doesn’t mean it’s OK to cry at your desk), how businesses are adapting in a post-Covid world, and how employees are beginning to value their company’s stance on social issues at rates higher than ever before. 

KCM: Workplaces are often thought to be “professional” rather than “personal” spaces, where empathy isn’t seen as a priority. Why do you believe that way of thinking needs to change?  

Cydney Roach: Most people are unaware that there are different types of empathy, and that they actually work differently in the brain. Cognitive empathy is the form of empathic leadership that we addressed in our research. Unlike the empathy you’d feel for a family member or loved one, where you’re feeling their pain or joy along with them, cognitive empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and observe how they might react. It isn’t necessarily the emotional, weepy reaction that we generally associate with empathy. I think the notion that empathy has to be highly emotional is one reason why empathy never seemed to have a role in the workplace. But in the same way that there are different types of love, there are different types of empathy, and cognitive empathy is actually crucial for a healthy work environment.

Historically, large companies have prioritized shareholders over employees. How is that changing, and why?

For several past generations, companies operated under the Milton Friedman economic view of business, where the focus was entirely on creating shareholder value.  It was really just a couple of years ago when the CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, released a letter saying, “we want to be a purpose-led organization, and we want to work with purpose-led clients.” The way he defined a purpose-led company is one that has defined values, vision, and a long-term mission for why they exist. This type of thinking is in opposition to companies who focus only on short-term “wins,” where they may lay people off in order to show “gains.” This new way of thinking made a big impact, and became the new mandate for businesses going forward.

Several months later, Business Roundtable came out saying that within a business, solely focusing on the needs of the shareholder was no longer appropriate — and that multi-stakeholder capitalism is the path forward to prosperity for people and the planet. In fact, we recently got back some data from the Edelman trust barometer, where we asked different global populations which group they thought was most crucial to the long-term success of a company. To my surprise, more than the customers or the shareholders, most respondents overwhelmingly replied that employees are most crucial to a company’s success. So employees have more material impact on a business than ever before.

How do you think the events of the past 18 months — the pandemic, and the marked increase in employee activism — have changed the way businesses operate?

Since the pandemic, we’ve seen CEO-level interest in employee attitudes and opinions. Every organization coming out of the pandemic has transformed, and if you don’t listen to how your employees have felt about that transformation, you’re not growing and innovating.

Then there’s this shift toward activism. In the last 18 months, we have seen unprecedented levels of employee activism. Our study from January found that one out of every two employees said they were much more likely to speak out or even protest if their company didn’t take a stance on societal issues. Employees also seem to have very high trust in their businesses. 33,000 respondents from 17 countries said they have more trust in business than in government and media. While that might sound surprising, it actually makes a lot of sense. Trust in government blossomed in the height of the pandemic, because everybody assumed that the government would be central to a strategy in getting things back to normal. And when the government in so many countries didn’t come through, it was businesses who stepped in to accelerate the development of vaccines. We also found out in January that trust in all sources of information media was at an unprecedented low. 

Historically, people have largely placed their trust in figures like presidents, generals, newspaper editors, and news anchors, but now trust has moved over to people’s own employers — so CEOs in general, but more importantly the CEO of the company you work at. This may be because people feel like they have some role in what happens within their own organization. They also have to have some respect for the organization, because they chose to work there. So in general, employees seem to have very high trust in their employer, but with that trust comes very high expectations. When those expectations aren’t met, employees feel less afraid to speak out.

Millions of people have done research on the best technology platform to bring together a hybrid workforce: what’s the best office space design, what should people’s hours be, et cetera.  But when I thought deeply about what’s most critical to the future of work, it was empathetic leadership. Without empathetic leadership, you can’t have a diverse, equitable, inclusive culture. You can’t have a workplace where everyone thrives unless you’re an empathetic leader — so one who listens to your employees concerns and acts on them. 

If you’re an employee and feel that your company isn’t leading with empathy, how do you foster that culture without rocking the boat?

This is what we in consulting call “bottom-up input,” and millennials seem to be the group that are most likely to engage in it. There was a New York Times article from a few years ago that said all demographics within an office generally want the same thing, but that millennials are much more likely to speak up and be vocal and assertive about what they want from their employers.

This type of action takes courage. When you’re weighing that against job security, I think it’s a decision that a lot of people would be wary about. There was the case last summer of Julie Bond, a very young black designer who won a coveted internship at Adidas and then became a full-time employee. And when she started the job, she  couldn’t believe the consistent racist decisions that were happening around her. She made formal complaints and went about it very professionally. She she later said she didn’t intend to start a walkout at Adidas, but she just couldn’t believe that HR wasn’t responding to her through formal channels. She was one person who created a movement within a company, through the power of one voice.  

But let’s be realistic. One of the statistics that came out in the trust barometer was that people were more afraid of losing their job than catching Covid-19. There were a lot of people who didn’t have a choice not to work during the pandemic, and still don’t have that choice. Those people probably don’t feel empowered to speak up, so the thing they can do when they see injustice in the workplace is to talk amongst their colleagues and see if they can make change through a larger group. Because there is power in numbers.