Covid-19 Reveals That We Need To Accelerate Empathy Adoption
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced businesses to transform the way they operate to adopt digitalization. Restaurants and coffee shops need to rethink how to sell foods without people coming to their shops. Most restaurants quickly onboard to online platforms to retain their sales, while some get creative and sells frozen version of their most popular menus — even Starbucks is selling one-liter bottle iced coffee. Point is, they need to quickly adapt to the situation.
There is no playbook on how to respond to the pandemic. Meaning that how businesses react is up to the leaders and to the culture of who runs it. Local restaurants are giving free meal to health workers. Fashion brands are repurposing their workshop to manufacture protective suits. Whatever it is, they are doing something outside of their pre-pandemic 5-year business plan.
These sudden changes mean one thing to their employees: added pressure with an unclear company direction. Employees have to cope with sudden changes to their daily life from the pandemic and from the workplace. No matter what level you are in the company, this is something that you will experience.
Leaders and working levels are in the same place — no corner office, no executive bathroom, no cubicles. Just our home, our makeshift workplace with doorbell ringing and kids screaming in the background. There is no separation between personal and professional lives.
On top of all these, the pandemic has changed the way we interact with people. As social animals, the act of social distancing is against our primal behavior. The lack of social connection to other humans are negatively affecting our health. A study of Google trends sees search queries during pandemic related to anxiety, negative thoughts, and sleep disturbances spiked to become the highest in history.
With all this happening, leaders need to understand and relate to employees. It's truly a challenge to have a work-life balance in this situation, and because of that, leaders need to be more empathetic and find ways to engage with their team on a personal level. Engaging and constantly listening on a personal level create a culture where employees are treated as human beings, rather than just headcounts.
If leaders only measure performance, it’s missing out on other valuable metrics such as employee engagement, satisfaction, and retention. These will create trust, and trust can create effectiveness in a workplace. If you have a leader that you can trust, you are willing to do more, and when you do more, your leader trusts you more. It creates a very healthy working relationship.
I genuinely hope that we can be more empathetic to everyone even after the pandemic ends. Most of the time, we see people from their position, what they do, how rich they are, but deep down, we are the same flesh and bones with emotions running through our veins. We are all humans. And we need to start humanizing humans.