Right now, for many of us working in office-based environments, we have a window into our colleagues’ lives that we rarely have. And, to some extent, a shared context that hasn’t existed since the 1940s.
For HR and EX teams seeking to include empathy in their employee experience design (and if you’re not, we’d argue you’re not in the business of EX design at all), this is a learning opportunity. It’s also an opportunity to develop and flex our empathy muscle – and help others do the same.
On a recent IDEO webcast, Sacha Connor of Virtual Work Insider described this period as a mass empathy experiment. And I’m inclined to agree.
Time to flex our empathy muscle
The great US psychologist Carol Dweck, the brain behind the growth mindset, suggests that empathy is not a fixed trait. It’s a muscle – a muscle that can be exercised and developed.
There are different types of empathy. The most useful to EX designers is cognitive empathy, the tool we use to cultivate an understanding of other people’s perspectives and ensure we don’t design purely based on our own experiences. The second is empathic concern, the ability to care and want to improve something for someone – this is not the same as being nice, eg negative feedback can be delivered with empathic concern. Employee experience happens within the cultural context of the organisation, and empathic concern is a key ingredient of a healthy culture and strong relationships.
Why does this matter now?
As many people have said multiple times over the last week or two, it is not realistic, or indeed right, to assume that people who are usually office-based are simply now able to carry on as normal with a bit of collaboration platform training. These are not normal times.
Whilst an employee’s life context has always bumped into their work context, to create an employee experience that is in reality a hybrid of different experiences, that collision is now happening at lightning speed. In the vision of colleagues through the web cam, and against the backdrop of a global pandemic, with an unknown impact on friends and family, the health service and the economy.
So now, more than ever, it’s time to flex our empathy muscle in our relationships with our colleagues. And let’s find ways to help managers and leaders do the same. Leading, managing, collaborating and coaching, all feel different in the virtual context. But for teams working in such challenging times, these things are needed like never before.
By flexing our empathy muscle can we can help everyone get through this stronger.
Time to learn
As EX designers – and EX design capability builders – we’re constantly seeking to inject empathy into the design process in order to develop a deeper understanding of our employees and their needs. We do this by putting ourselves in their shoes, either through observing them, engaging in joint exploration, or immersing ourselves in their experience through experiments of one kind or another.
But now, like at no other point, we have something else in the mix – we can see into the context of our colleagues’ lives in all the messy, stressy reality of them. And, as managers and leaders, perhaps for the first time, we’re truly experiencing what it is like to work from home in virtual, or distributed teams.
There is a world of learning happening right now. But like any experiment, we need to be conscious of what is happening and open to learning from it. If we don’t, we’ll miss an opportunity. So be cognisant of what is happening to you and to your colleagues. Ask questions – lots of them. And listen, really listen. Take notes. Keep a diary. Share your own thoughts, but don’t assume your experience is the same as other people’s.
Make the learning real and don’t lose it as we rush to the next stage.
When this is over, however we emerge, we will need to think about how we design experiences for all our people – wherever they are and however they work. We’ll be in a much better place to do that if we’ve been mindful of the journey we’ve been on and what we’ve learnt on the way.
@Belinda Gannaway
If you’re interested in developing your ‘empathy muscle’ then sign up to our next online EX by Design workshop. Or if you’d like to find out more about the workshop, join us over lunch on Weds 15th April, 1pm – 1.45pm, where Emma and Belinda will talk through what you can expect from the workshops and answer your questions.
