Empathy Expansion Kit: The Future of Empathy in Business - Trends and Predictions

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Welcome back to the show. This episode is part of our Empathy Expansion Kit series. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with Tullio Siragusa.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:26)
Hello, everybody.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:29)
One of our main goals of this podcast is to help you build a more authentic business and work life. One of the best ways to do that is to build empathy and love into what you do. In this series, we're going to dive into some bite-sized topics on building empathy into your work life. Today, we dive into the future of empathy in the business, some trends, and some predictions. Tullio, this is something that I definitely feel passionate about just having studied consciousness forever.
Consciousness is rising, so you can check out our podcast on Conscious Capitalism if you want to get into a more thorough discussion of this. But just briefly, you're kind of seeing these younger generations, they're coming online with getting to a higher consciousness much faster. And the reason is because of the generations before them kind of paving the way and it's kind of a stepping stone. But, you know, from ages to 20, they're coming up to a much higher state of consciousness than we were, say, 100 years ago, right, just because of the gravity of society. And so what this is doing to the workplace is they're coming in with ideas looking for more empathy, more love in the workplace, more diversity, more of seeing through other people's eyes and perspectives.
This is a good thing. I know there's a lot of controversy in some of this right now for some reason. But, you know, evolution isn't pretty, but it's beautiful, you know, in the long run. So we're going to be stepping on each other, trying to figure out a process to get there. But this is what people want, Tullio. They want an empathetic workplace.
This is where it's going.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:18)
You know, for a long time, I thought the newer generation is the one who wanted it the most.
But it's not true. We all want it.
In fact, there have been studies that suggest that companies who do this will do better than others. EMY did a study last year about the evolving state of empathy in the workplace.
And 87% of the people they surveyed find empathy, empathetic leadership, inspiring positive change in the workplace. The same 87% found that having empathetic leadership in the workplace fosters mutual respect between employees and leaders. And 85% believe that it also increases productivity among employees. And almost 80%, 78% believe that it reduced employee turnover. Now, the interesting number that I found is that 92% of employees surveyed across all four workplace generations, all generations said that the company culture has an impact on their decision to remain with their current employer. So, you know, we talk about being empathetic as a valuable thing for people in the organization, but there's data that suggests the business impact of having empathy in the workplace. But also there's additional data that suggests that 90% of all of us expect this. And so the future is bright in the sense that more and more expecting this will not tolerate anything less than. So initially, I think what you're going to see is a lot of rage. Some of the newer generation are just angry, and I don't blame them. They are just ragefully angry.
But I want you all to know we were part of that process, not that we wanted it because we had to play along. So the good news is we don't want it anymore. Nobody wants it. Nobody wants that environment where there's no empathy, there's no love, there's no human humanity into the organization. So what's going to happen is there's opportunity in this.
Even though these surveys have been done, I'm still not seeing software being created with embedded empathy components to it. There's improvements, for example, in business intelligence software. Tableau has implemented embedded BI, so has Microsoft with their Power BI. So now you can see data points real time at the application layer, but none of these have yet implemented the experience of being able to track and understand the experience that employees are having, the interaction that employees are having, which is going to be critical to creating an environment where that empathy is alive. What's the checkpoint right now to know if the things are being done in a way that supports 92% of employees who want this? And unfortunately, until board of directors, we talked about this in previous podcasts, until board of directors start having committees that look at the employee satisfaction as one of the KPIs tied to empathetic culture, until that happens, without that governance, you're going to have problems pushing this through. Now, ideally, we don't need to have that in place. If 92% of all of us feel like we need this, then there's executives running companies that are also part of that 92%. Stop wearing a different mask when you show up to the office. Be genuine all the time and make the changes because this is what people want. Those who embrace it are going to have an opportunity to do it in their software product and their product offerings. They're going to leverage the fact that 92% of people want this. There's a huge opportunity here, Stephen, that's not being taken advantage of yet.