One of the throughlines of my career in social services has been witnessing the power of empathy. I first discovered this power as an undergraduate criminal justice major, when I completed a field placement at a local juvenile detention center. There I saw firsthand how sharing stories and working to mutually understand feelings could make a real impact on the challenges in people’s lives. When I went on to become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, with a professional duty to improve human relationships and promote well-being, I continued to harness this tool in providing services to children, adolescents, and adults. The more I worked, the more evidence I saw for how empathy could be a universal, innovative vehicle for change.
But what is empathy, and how is it different from sympathy? Empathy is the ability to take on the perspectives of others by recognizing, understanding, and exchanging thoughts and feelings. Across domains, researchers have found evidence that this practice motivates many prosocial behaviors—such as forgiveness, volunteering, and helping—while decreasing antisocial behaviors like aggression and bullying. Empathy, in other words, is the act of “feeling with” someone else, while sympathy is the act of “feeling for” someone else. You can sympathize with someone without understanding their perspective or emotions, which in some cases might only leave them feeling further isolated. Particularly when it comes to understanding people who are different from you, empathy can be a much greater force.
This is equally true in our workplace relationships as any others, as I’ve discovered in my work with organizations to improve staff morale. By practicing empathy with your colleagues, understanding where they’re coming from and how they’re feeling, you can create a healthier workplace where people feel seen and respected, reducing the risks of burnout. Preventing burnout is especially important in service-oriented fields like museums, where workers are tasked with meeting both the strategic goals of the organization and the needs of the community, leading to a unique set of stressors. This issue has only increased in the last few years, as the pandemic and high-profile incidents of social injustice have manifested in dysfunctional workplace dynamics, lack of social support, and limited work/life balance.
So, how do we start alleviating this chronic stress and putting empathy into practice? From my collective work across sectors, I’ve put together a framework I call B.U.I.L.D.
B: Bring Everyone to the Table
Skip over related stories to continue reading articleRestoring the soul of your organization should not be a transactional or hierarchical process. In any initiative where you seek to make systemic change, it’s vital to include everyone in your organization, in all positions and levels. This way, everyone will have the opportunity to listen, engage, and provide feedback on internal and external challenges, and discuss how proposed solutions may impact their work.
For example, when I formulated a committee at a health care organization to help alleviate a patient scheduling issue, I made sure to convene everyone involved at every step of the process of seeing patients, from the receptionists receiving the requests, to the patient representatives, to the shuttle service drivers, to the clinical providers, to the fiscal specialists, to the executive leadership. Without this interdisciplinary approach, where people from different departments came together to compare their processes and discuss mutually beneficial solutions, we would not likely have gained the same amount of insight to address the problem. Furthermore, each participant departed from our meetings feeling more valued as a team member and empowered to use their voice in the future. As a result, our patients were able to access the services needed without delay.
U: Understand Different Perspectives
Bringing everyone together is a powerful first step, but it’s not enough to facilitate empathy on its own. The next step is to create a safe space where your colleagues can comfortably communicate, so they are able to both share their own perspectives and take in those of their colleagues.
For instance, when I conducted a pilot program with the Alaska-based health care nonprofit Southcentral Foundation to increase its standard of performance, we started by creating a three-day training to teach employees how to share and receive a story. The experience was a reminder to respect the inherent dignity and worth of a person and to be mindful of the strengths that each person brings to the table across disciplines and expertise. As a result, the workforce created a common language, developed shared values, and increased flexibility around how to meet their goals. The foundation went on to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the highest level of recognition for organizational performance excellence in the United States, in both 2011 and 2017.
I: Incorporate Mental Wellness Strategies
The open dialogue that empathy depends on starts from a foundation of mental wellness in the participants. If the employees of an organization don’t have opportunities to rest and process their emotions and experiences, it will be harder for them to articulate them to others. For that reason, it’s important to build opportunities to rest and practice mindfulness into your organizational culture. These could take the form of dedicated time blocks for breaks or workshops, or dedicated spaces where employees can unwind and interact with their colleagues outside of the workspace.
Setting this as a priority can have major benefits for an organization, including increased productivity, improved client satisfaction, and better employee retention. In a 2022 survey from the American Psychological Association, for instance, 81 percent of respondents said that support for mental health within the workplace would be an important consideration for them in future employment opportunities. As a final note, it’s important to remember to implement these strategies even when things are going well, rather than wait until morale is suffering.
L: Learn About Your Team
Empathy is also built on trust, and trust starts with getting to know the people you work with on a personal level. This is especially important in this moment, when team dynamics have changed so much in the turbulence of the past few years. Some people on your team may have retreated into themselves, while others may have found their voice and become more visible. Some might have left the department or organization for other roles, while others may have newly joined. So, it’s a good time to ask yourself, how well do you know your team? And if the answer is not as well as you could, think about how you can change that.
One way to get your team members more familiar with each other is to create dedicated times or spaces for them to connect on non-work topics. For example, I recently collaborated with the Norton Museum of Art in Florida to facilitate an Art Wellness Exchange® experience for educators from Palm Beach County. Professionals from varying years of experience, academic expertise, and organizational levels gathered at the museum to discuss self-care and burnout using collections on view as a jumping-off point. The carefully cultivated setting gave them a space to reflect, be vulnerable, and fully engage in the active listening process. Offering something similar to your team members could go a long way to helping them better know and understand each other.
D: Develop a Feedback Loop
Creating the conditions for empathy in your organization not only empowers the workforce, but also allows for accurate intervention when operational challenges arise. Once your team is at a place where they can easily share and compare experiences, you can establish a system for frequent conversations of this sort, so things run smoothly as you experience internal and external changes.
For example, when I facilitate workshops, I often gain valuable insight by asking participants open-ended questions such as, “Did you feel safe during your experience?” “If so, how?” “In what ways can we improve your experience?” This type of prompting, and the active listening it requires me to do, can challenge me to reconsider how well my strategies for inclusivity are working. It can also help to facilitate dialogue, and as a result, decrease conflict.
In the last few years, many of us have witnessed significant fallout from burnout and the desperate need for self-care, which has left us in a perpetual loop of reacting to a chain of events. As a result, exhaustion has invaded our minds and bodies, leaving us feeling professionally depleted. While the culture of every organization is unique, the utility of empathy to address problems transcends these differences. Creating the conditions for empathy within the workplace removes the stigma around mental wellness and only creates additional value to our professional toolkit. It is my hope to see organizations dedicate themselves to B.U.I.L.D.-ing, one day at a time.
What is missing in this article is a reference to the growing trend of unionization within museums throughout the country — indicative of the lack of empathy of museum administrators and trustees towards the people tasked with direct cultural stewardship and public interface. More importantly, the resistance of cultural organizations to the union movement, as witnessed by the recent reneging on longevity pay as contractually agreed upon by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, underscores the indifference and outright hostility of museum elites towards the working-class challenges their staffers are faced with, among which are historic wage suppression (common across many industries over the past forty years), inflation, increasing rents, and lack of incentive or merit pay. Employee morale, as such, is the responsibility of the organization, which begins at the top, and is often notoriously missing in HR departments, which tend to protect the institution foremost, not the employees. I’m delighted that multiple museums are partnering to curate mental wellness experiences — too bad some of the major arts institutions are not paying anything more than lip service to the idea when it comes to their own staff.