The Significance of empathy in the working environment

The art of understanding and relating thoughts, emotions or experience of people around us is known as empathy.

The best way to experience empathy is by stepping into another person’s shoes, know their emotions and understand their necessity.   

When working in professional environment, empathy help's us in expressing care and respect for our co-workers. This will not only demonstrate your thoughts but also send out a message that we just can't keep following rules and regulations.

Let’s try to answer few questions which would address the core values of empathy: -

1.   At work environment why does it matters to understand the needs of people around us?

      The scale of every good professional goes off when they come across terminology “relationships” at work place.  This is not bad at all as everyone understands what problems come across when improper relationship is built at work environment. 

      This being truly said, “the baby cannot be thrown out with the bath water”. Similarly, with respect to team to work strongly together, team members and leaders must have to develop proper relationship with each other. 

          

          2.  List down qualities one require for someone being Empathetic?

 
       The three most important quality one must have for being Empathetic are: -

• Listening
•  Openness
•  Understanding 

      Empathetic person will always listen to others actively, will be open to discuss/accept ideas and suggestion given by people around them, and most importantly will understand everything which is being suggested by others and give them feeling of being heard and recognized.

       A leader will always realize that bottom line in any business is achieved through the people and with  the people around them.

               3.  What kind of role Empathy plays at work place? And how does it matter?

       One should always know that if S/he knows their team, then they will have better idea of problems  coming ahead and how to address them.

•    Empathy helps individual to feel safe and motivated even when they fail, as they know that they  won’t be individually blamed for anything.
•   Empathy motivates leaders to understand the problem and find root cause of problem to solve it in  the times of failure.
•  A leader with Empathetic qualities will always help his/her struggling team members to improve  and accelerate.      

      Leader in organization should be empathetic to deal with failures, week team performances and be successful with the team.

So in my opinion a leader, team member and organization should understand significance of empathy in the working environment to achieve their organization’s goals.

      “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” -  Theodore Roosevelt