HR Grapevine podcast: Empathy in HR Leadership

Erik Niewiarowski
from HR Grapevine.com, it is the HR Grapevine podcast. Hello there, Erik Niewiarowski.
Thank you for listening today. This is the second instalment of our special series called Workplace of now, and that is in partnership with Zellis.
Now for those of you who don’t know, Zellis are the UK and Ireland’s leading provider of payroll and HR solutions. They have over 50 years of heritage and industry experience and have been ahead of the curve throughout.
So, in this second instalment of the Workplace of now, we’re going to discuss empathy in HR leadership. And to help guide me on this journey, I’m going to be joined by Gethin Nadin, Chief Innovation Officer at Zellis. He is also an award-winning psychologist and a best-selling author dealing with all things employee wellbeing. So certainly the proper guide to help me unpack the ideas of how empathetic leaders in HR have employees with better wellbeing.
So, we’re going to talk about ensuring that leaders are actively listening and acting on people’s needs. The intersection of productivity, performance and wellbeing and the key metrics HR leaders are looking to gauge the wellbeing of their employees. I had a great conversation with Gethin and here it is. So, I want to talk today about empathy. Empathy, Gethin, is one of my favourite topics. Before I tell you why, can you just quickly kind of give your take on what empathy is?
 
Gethin Nadin
So I think, when I’ve been talking to HR leaders about empathy, I think one of the best ways is to really understand empathy at work is to try and just really understand what it’s like to be an employee in a situation. So, if you look at good product managers, and big companies – like Apple – have empathy as a design principle, they think about “if somebody’s got the iPhone in their hand, what’s their experience?” Like, kind of, “if I have to wait two seconds for an app to open? What does that feel like? And how does that make me feel?” And so, I think from an HR perspective, what we’re really doing is trying to effectively walk a mile in the shoes of the end employee.
So, if I am going for an interview with you, how does that look like for the employee? Are you making me wait at the door for five minutes longer than they should? Empathise with the fact that when you go and interview for a job, that’s very nervous experience. And so, people might be leaving a job they hate or is not very good for their mental health. They might be not just excited about coming to work with you and the potential of working with you, but also quite anxious about that big change. And so, if we interview that person, and then don’t tell them how they did, and don’t get back to them for weeks and weeks on end, is that being empathetic? It’s probably not.
So I think it’s about, how do we consider the employee that sits at the end of all these different things we do, and empathise with them around, you know, is this benefit, easy to understand? Was my pay delivered on time? And is it accurate? And understanding that if we don’t really empathise with somebody, we run the risk of disengagement very quickly. I think that’s why empathy has become such a strong leadership trait is because we all want it and it’s all very important to us in our modern lives. And, I’m sure we’ll come on to talk about it, but underpins an awful lot of wellbeing at work as well.
 
Erik
Really, the reason why I really value and really like talking about empathy is exactly what you said was with the experience, right? I have a little background in UX design myself, and empathy is one of those key points, right? I just I love talking about it. And one of the best descriptions around empathy I’ve ever heard was ‘empathy is a muscle, you have to continue to work it out.’ And I take that with me. And as I try and progress within my career, aside from the technical skills, soft skills are ever more important to me. Empathy is really at the top of the list for me. So along with that, now we know what empathy is, why we both value it so much; With employee wellbeing at the top of the agenda at a lot of organisations, how can leaders ensure that they’re listening to enacting on their employee’s needs?
 
Gethin
So I think that’s a really important point, because I think, when we think about wellbeing at work, a conversation I frequently have with people is ‘what does it actually mean?’ And I think those waters have become quite muddied over time.
I think the growing trend of wellbeing – you know – the money has followed that and what’s happened is we’ve commodified an industry to the extent that “Oh, you’re struggling, your mental health has declined. Buy this thing. Do this thing, and we will solve that problem.”
So, it’s on a personal level. For most of it, it’s this idea of, “I’m really stressed at work. Work’s being really busy. I’ve got two weeks off, I’m going to now pay to sit on a beach for two weeks to recuperate from a really busy time I’ve had at work.”
And that’s not what wellbeing should be. Wellbeing shouldn’t be a reaction to, or a sticking plaster to somebody that’s already suffered. But the point in your question there, which is really important, I think, is that that listening. When you look at what makes us happy, what psychologists call ‘subjective wellbeing’. A lot of that – inside and outside of work – is
Do I have a voice?
Do I feel like I’m being listened to?
Does my contribution count?
And so I think, you know, wellbeing in many ways does start with listening to what people need. And I think if you then cross that with empathy, that kind of understanding, the route that many of our people are taking through the business, we have to empathise with those people to get wellbeing, right?
And so, you know, what does my experience look like at work? If I’m a black employee? or what does my experience look like if I’m a gay employee? and so you start to have to empathise different because you start to understand that actually, some of those people have got different wellbeing challenges, right? If you’re a single parent, you’re going to have different wellbeing challenges to somebody who might be single living on their own. And so, I think the diversity of people that we employ, is so ever changing and so diverse, and their wellbeing needs are so diverse, that we have no option but to listen to what people have got to say and ask them what they need to survive at work. And I’m sure everyone listening to this podcast now, if we were to ask them “What do you need today, to ensure your wellbeing is kind of tip-top condition, exactly where it needs to be?”
You’d get hundreds of thousands of different answers, right?
And so I think your wellbeing has to begin with asking those questions, and listening to what people say. But there’s almost a step before that, which is, ‘how have I created an environment whereby somebody is going to tell me their truth?’ Because if we don’t create a trusting environment, nobody’s going to tell me the truth. And I think the reason why we’ve had such a stigma around things like mental health is because people have been afraid to tell the truth at work. People have been afraid to go into work and say
“I’m really worried about debt.”
or
“I’m really worried about my wife, or my kids, or friends in this”
 
And so you’ve got to create that trusting environment, then ask the questions, and then act to that, I think is the order in which those things need to happen.
 
Erik
In your expert opinion, has the pandemic and all of us/majority of us working from home – has it been easier, do you think, to create this safe space that you’re talking about where you can genuinely gauge in an employee how they’re feeling? As opposed to you know, say, like an office environment?
 
Gethin
Yeah, I think it’s a good question. I think it has a little bit because I think that one of the common themes of the pandemic was we all experienced and demonstrated more humanity than we’ve probably seen in most of our lives. And so if you look at, you know, in the UK, sense of community has been falling since about 2011. So people haven’t felt like they belong to a community. The pandemic hit, and all of a sudden, my elderly parents were telling me that neighbours they’d never met were knocking on their door and saying, if you need some shopping, we’ll go out and get some stuff for you. You had kids putting rainbows in their windows, and we all clapped on our doorstep. So, we all felt like we were part of a community than most of us, I think I’ve ever felt in our lives. And I think that happened in the workplace, too. We all started to feel like we were part of something. So, I think the pandemic has certainly had an impact on bringing people together in a way that perhaps they hadn’t at work before. But I also think, because we were all experiencing this trauma at the same time, and we will all experience in the way that it was having a physical, financial and emotional effect. We knocked down a few of those barriers to talking about it. So it seemed a little bit more normalised to talk about mental health because everyone was experiencing – or most people were experiencing – poor mental health in the UK alone. And I think by the time the second lockdown had finished, about 20 to 25% of people say they experienced poor mental health for the first time in their life. So all of a sudden, en mass, we went ‘actually this is more easier to talk about’ because more people were either talking about it or experiencing it.
And so I think, you know, we can glibly make a joke of ‘it only took a pandemic for employers to take employee wellbeing seriously’, but the reality is for the first time ever, more of us experienced this stuff openly at once and couldn’t really hide from it, which allowed us to break down that stigma and talk about it a little bit more. And I think also we physically brought home and work together in – you know – they’d been merging for quite a long time. But, you know, people are having video calls with their kids. running around in the background, and we’re seeing each other’s living rooms and bedrooms and such. And so I think that will help as well, because people were working in an environment that, in many ways was comfortable because it was home. And it was a safe – physically safe – space for lots of people. not everyone, but for most people.
And we had managers acting in a way that they always should have. So, in this country and the UK, we started to see during the first lockdown that employee engagement scores increased in two thirds of British companies, because managers checked in more and CEOs got on video calls and said “We care about you, and we’re doing this and we’re being more transparent, and I’m talking to you more.” And so we did all the things that boost employee engagement in the first place, but we did them more regularly. And then as we got used to lock downs, and we got used to the pandemic, the data tells us that actually, by the time the third lockdown came, people were 25% less likely to say they felt supported at work. So it became a little bit normalised quite quickly. But I definitely think that the conditions of the pandemic did allow people to open up more about their mental health challenges, perhaps more than ever and normalise that a little bit more in the workplace.
 
Erik
Alright, so wellbeing and all of that is great, right? and HR needs to pay attention to that. But they also have to make sure that their employees are being productive. They are achieving performance, hitting all of their KPIs. So how do these concepts of wellbeing, productivity and performance all interact with each other?
 
Gethin Nadin
So many, many years ago, I visited and pitched to a very well-known British football club. And as part of that meeting, they took me around the stadium and told me a few things that kind of went on Match Day, etc. And they – I’m not a big football fan, so I’ll probably terms wrong. But they were telling me about the nutritionists that work for the team. So you have a team of people who are creating meals and meal plans, because they realised that actually, performance was enhanced when things like wellbeing were taken care of at work. But they also show me how, you know, the physiotherapist that were available, and the doctors, and all this kind of team that sat around the main football team that were all there because they realized; if we pull all these different relievers of sleep, and good mental health and food, if we did all these things right, our team were far more likely to score goals, and we were far more likely to proceed as a football club. And that was my first real inkling as to, actually, so why don’t we do that in the workplace?
So, you see the same with, so for major football matches. And we saw this last year with the England football team. They were like sent off to a country house hotel, they were all messing around in a swimming pool. And there’s some well-known pictures. Now some football stars like floating around on big inflatable unicorns in the swimming pool of this country House Hotel. Again, they realise these people are going to experience a lot of stress and pressure the next day, we need to get them in the best position possible so that they can perform in a really enhanced way. And we don’t think about people at work that way. I’ve never heard of somebody say to a salesperson, you’ve got that really big pitch tomorrow, go home, take the afternoon off, do what you need to do to get into the right headspace so that you will perform your best tomorrow.
Yeah, no different to kind of rock and pop stars who have riders, they have a list of things that they need, you know; I want a quiet room, and I want a diffuser, and I want opera playing, because that’s all the stuff that gets me into the right mindset so that I will perform best when I get on stage.
And so when we talk about wellbeing at work, that’s exactly what we’re doing. What we’re doing is trying to find out, ‘Erik, what do you need to be able to perform the best you possibly can tomorrow?‘ Finding out what that is, and where possible delivering that. Because the relationship between wellbeing and productivity is creating the environment for people to thrive and deliver their best. And there’s this great quote that I heard used many years ago, which was
“Nobody comes up with a great idea being chased by a lion.”
When you’re worried about money, when you’re worried about relationships, when you’re worried about your mental health, all these things that will happen to every single one of us in our lives at some point. When those things are affecting our lives and affecting our mood and our health. We can’t give our best at work. And so that’s why wellbeing has arguably – fairly or unfairly – fallen on the shoulders of employers to deal with. Because for years and years, we’ve decided we wanted to merge home and work life, right? We did that before the pandemic, and now people are unsurprisingly bringing home into work. So if that’s affecting their performance, these are things we have to deal with. And so that’s why, you know, for the 10 years or so that I’ve been talking about wellbeing at work.
When I first started talking about it I was told a lot by employers “We don’t want to get involved in people’s lives outside of work.” It was seen as being too paternalistic to be kind of advising employees on how to save money or get better sleep or have more physical exercise. But now we’ve kind of gone past that point. And I think what was really interesting during the pandemic is the day the UK locked down – the day Boris Johnson announced the UK was locking down – I had about seven or eight phone calls from customers I work with basically saying “That wellbeing thing you were going to talk to us about? Yeah, we need to do that. Now. We’re ready.” And it feels like whilst lots of employees were kind of clambering around trying to find the fire extinguisher and reading the instructions, those that had made a prior commitment to wellbeing weathered the storm of the pandemic better, because they had all the things in place that would support their people during the pandemic.
We’ve got to understand that wellbeing isn’t just doing the right thing. It certainly is a lot of that. But it’s about, how do we create more successful organisations by taking better care of people so that they’re in a better position to deliver the great customer service? I did a talk at a conference – a keynote talk many years ago – and one of the things I was talking about then, and I was quoted in the newspaper by saying it. But, you think about the happiest place on Earth, which is apparently officially Disney World in Florida – happiest place on Earth. And people spend thousands of pounds and thousands of dollars to go on a family trip there, a once in a lifetime trip. And all the staff members, the cast members, as they call them – whatever troubles they’ve got in life, they have to leave at the door. Because as I said to this paper at the time, nobody wants to go to Disneyland and meet a pissed-off Mickey Mouse. But that’s what our employees are doing every day, right? We’ve got people at home now who are struggling with the cost-of-living increases, who have zero disposable income every month. And we’re expecting them to stand in front of our customers and smile and act like life outside of work is not affecting them. And it’s just unrealistic. Yeah, so to be able to deliver the best customer service to make sure people collaborate more, for us to sell more products. For us to make sure that customer loyalty is where it needs to be, for people to create and invent better products and innovate for us, we have to make sure they’re in the best shape possible. And so that’s all that wellbeing really is. Is about us taking better care of people so that they can perform their best at work. Right?
 
Erik
You know, when you shout it out that rhetorical question to me, like, “what do I need?” I kind of froze up a bit because I’ve never been asked that. So I’m wondering, how can HR help employees feel safe? To answer that question, in an honest way? It’s just a very jarring question. And I’m wondering even if HR teams made the investment and have the proper training, and to ask that question, how do you really get that 100% authentic response from the employee?
 
Gethin Nadin
Yeah, it’s a really good point. There’s something in psychology – behavioural psychology – called ‘libertarian paternalism’. And that is this idea that in many cases, some of us might know what employees need to be doing, but they don’t. And I think, you know, the complexities of stuff behind mental health means the other reasons why somebody has poor mental health can be very vast and ever changing, as I mentioned before. And so asking people what they need is not necessarily a really simple question, because they might not know what they need. But I think as HR people become more familiar with the evidence, and spend time listening to podcasts like this, and going to conferences, and reading blogs, and articles, they are ballooning their knowledge. And some of this stuff might sound really basic, but it’s not known by the average person. And so, I think there’s an opportunity for HR leaders to guide people more to the solutions that they need to see.
So, you know, thinking about managers and empathizing. Part of that is, you might be able to understand that somebody is on their way to struggling before they actually, really struggle. Because I think lots of mental health is – I was on a podcast years ago, and I never didn’t think of this phrase before I said it. But they always say about thirst. When you actually feel thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. So, by the time your body feels physically thirsty, you’re well on your way to being dehydrated. And I think our own poor mental health acts in the same way, by the time we really feel it, By the time it’s disrupting our sleep, we’ve already been living with it for quite a long time, that anxiety or whatever it might be. Yeah, I think sometimes managers are in a really good position to just look at somebody and say, you might think you’re coping but I think you’ve been doing too much this week. I think you’ve got too much on your plate. And I’m going to proactively take some of that away from you or help you deal with that. And I think that’s where the real magic happens at wellbeing at work when you have a leadership team that are empowered to really look after their team in that way and identify that, no, no, you need some time off and I need to encourage you to take some time off because you We all want to impress, we all want to work hard, we all want to get recognised for a job well done. And so I think sometimes it’s far easier for somebody else to notice we need to take a break than it is for us to so I think sometimes that libertarian paternalism needs to kick in, which is basically this idea of, there’s a decision I need you to make, and I’m going to point you towards, but ultimately you can still make that decision.
 
Erik
Yeah, and for those listening, you can’t see this, but I’m nodding furiously in agreement with Gethin there. Because, just going back to my own history, having just an awful start to the year, had to take some time off. And when I came back, having the leadership come to me and say ‘You came back to work too soon.’ really made me feel just exactly like you said, like, they noticed that really, before I could, and, and to be supportive it you know, it really meant a lot. It’s certainly making me stay and engaged with my job. So I wholeheartedly agree.
 
Gethin
Yeah, and I’ve had the same. So I am very engaged in my job. But it’s like a vocation for me, a lot of my time spent outside of work is reading and researching about the things to do well being employee experience. And so I run the risk of burnout through over engagement quite regularly. So I need somebody to literally pull the reins. So my CEO will very, very regularly kind of say “Are you doing too much, I think you need to take a step back.” And so it happens on the opposite side as well, you know, people run the risk. And I don’t think we talked enough about over-engagement. And I think when we talk about burnout during the pandemic, some of that is related to the fact that because I’m not physically seen in my workplace in the way that used to, I’m now in this situation where actually, maybe I am overcompensating, and I’m working a little bit too hard to try and compensate for that kind of physical distance between me and my place of work. And so, I think that’s been a feature of burnout as well as through people putting in too much effort because they’re trying too hard.
 
Erik
Yeah, exactly. Okay, well, let’s wrap up this first episode we have you on, on the Workplace of now, around wellbeing, what are some metrics that HR leaders can be looking at?
 
Gethin Nadin
So we are, I think, within HR, obsessed with measuring things, right? We love a data point. For a long time, people have believed that, kind of, HR has now become people analytics. And we get lots of points of data now. And I think, first of all, lots of data doesn’t mean anything unless we interpret that data. And I think if you look at historical measures of wellbeing at work, we were looking at stuff like ‘what’s my absent rates? And what’s my turnover rate?‘ Kind of looking at that kind of attendance type stuff. And when you really start to delve into some of that data, I’m not entirely sure what it really tells you. There was some research, I think, done by the CIPD years ago that looked at asking people if they’ve ever phoned in sick because of a mental health problem, but what reason did they give and something like 99% of people said they found in with a mental health problem, but just pretended they had the flu or bad stomach due to stigma. And they didn’t want to have a conversation about mental health. So. So that starts to tell you that actually, what do those absence rates really tell you? And then you start to look at the fact that I know personally, people that have phoned in sick, because they just can’t stand their manager and want to limit as much time as possible around them. So again, that data doesn’t really give you the real story in many cases, I think those kind of objective measures of wellbeing have started to give way to subjective measures, which I think is far more compelling. And back to our first point, that is, we are asking people. And so when I do wellbeing workshops with with Zellis group customers, and I’ve done about 100-150 of those over the last two years, the first question I always ask the customers that I work with is “If I stopped one of your employees on the street, and I tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Does your employer care about you?’ What would their answer be to that question?” I think if you start to think about asking those types of questions, how you get to a positive answer doesn’t really matter. If your employees are saying, Yeah, I know that my boss cares about me, and the company cares about me. And if I went through a divorce, or if my parents died, would they be there for me? And would they do the right thing? And could I trust them to take care of my well being?
If the answers those questions are yes, then keep doing what you’re doing. So I think sometimes this data can give us some interesting points of things to develop and stuff. But fundamentally, I don’t think there is any better way of finding out how are you helping the individual employee than asking them? Are we doing the right things by you? What else do you need? So back to our first point, you know, you need to create this culture of trust for those answers to be given. But I think that’s far more compelling and the customers that I work with and the employees that I’ve read about that do that really well. A while on their way to success. Rather than focusing on some of those metrics that historically might have told us something, but I just don’t think were relevant anymore.
 
Erik Niewiarowski
So on that note, Gethin Nadin, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Workplace of now.
 
Gethin
Excellent. Thanks for having me. Great.
 
Erik
Well, once again, I just like to thank Gethin Nadin. He is a best selling author, a psychologist and the Chief Innovation Officer at Zellis – for helping me to unpack the idea of empathy in HR leadership, and really kind of getting deep with me on the concept of wellbeing and all the different facets that it contains. Once again, thank you for listening. Thank you to our partners at Zellis and we will hear from Gethin again in a later episode on the Workplace of now, where we define what a healthy workplace consists of. So, until then, have a great day.