Is America Polarized or Just Majority Fundamentalist? 

This article has two aims: To engage in the question of whether America is not polarized, but just majority fundamentalist, and to establish new goals for a category that goes beyond leftism or liberalism, which I am calling ‘the new minority’. We will also cover the role of empathy and what empathy needs to be effective in both paradigms

How Belonging and Empathy Reduce Turnover

People have been leaving their jobs in droves over the past few years. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in December, and a record-breaking 10.9 million jobs were vacant at the end of 2021. This trend doesn’t seem to be leveling off anytime soon either; 43% of the global workforce is likely to consider changing jobs in the coming year, and that number is as high as 52% among Gen-Z and millennials. This “Great Resignation” has made it imperative for businesses to understand why employees are leaving and how to fix it. Unfortunately, many companies assume their employees are quitting for the wrong reasons.

Two factors come readily to mind to explain increases in job turnover: unsatisfactory wages and issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). With the economic bust brought on by the pandemic, and the fact that both women and Black professionals have been leading the charge in resignations since 2021, these assumptions are certainly not unfounded. But companies that have spent time and money ameliorating these issues have not seen as big a return on their investment as they might have expected. 

In the U.S. alone, about $8 billion per year is spent on diversity trainings, and yet there is little to no evidence that these trainings have made companies more diverse. And though the average salary increase has risen 21% from 2021 to 2022, this does not seem to influence turnover intentions much – perhaps because a huge amount of the increase in satisfaction when switching to a higher-paying job, at least 80%, is due to improvements other than wages. The failure of diversity and wage-increase initiatives shows that there is a fundamental mismatch between why companies think their employees are quitting and why they are actually quitting. 

So why are employees leaving their companies now more than ever? To answer this, it can help to empathize with these former employees, to try to understand their feelings and perspective. Walking a mile in their shoes might help us understand the forces pulling them toward other obligations in their life or pushing them away from their current company. Moreover, being more empathetic not only helps us understand why employees are resigning, but could itself help reduce employee turnover. Insights from behavioral science research suggest that cultivating empathy in the workplace – including a sense of belonging among all workers and greater emotional intelligence among managers – is vital for employee retention.

Employees Crave an Empathetic Workplace

An empathetic workplace is one of the top needs of working professionals, who are keenly aware when their company lacks empathy. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) surveyed nearly 2,500 U.S. workers to better understand how they experience empathy in the workplace – and how this impacts their employers. Critically, 97% of those surveyed believed empathy is essential for a healthy workplace culture. What’s more, employees who rated their organization low in empathy were also more than twice as likely to have actively searched for a new job in the past six months. Another survey of workers conducted by Businessolver found that 72% of employees would consider leaving their current company if it displayed less empathy, but 92% said they would be more likely to stay with their current company if it empathized with their needs more.

These findings highlight a key insight: company culture has a massive impact on employee retention. In one study that analyzed data from over 34 million U.S. workers’ online profiles, toxic corporate culture was far and away the top reason employees left their companies – over ten times more important for predicting attrition than compensation. The biggest factors contributing to toxic workplace culture all orbit around a lack of empathy: failure to promote DEI, workers feeling disrespected, and unethical behavior, to name a few.

If you are feeling dismayed by your workplace’s lack of empathy, take heart! The good news is that companies can improve their culture of empathy with some relatively minor tweaks. Research in behavioral science tells us that active trainings designed to increase empathy in business settings really do work. Even simple adjustments can help cultivate a more empathetic company culture.

Two Ways to Increase Workplace Empathy

There are many different expressions of empathy, such as perspective taking, active listening, and validating someone’s feelings. Behavioral science research reveals that two components in particular can drastically reduce turnover and are relatively easy to implement in the workplace: a sense of belonging and emotional intelligence.

#1 – Help Employees Feel Like They Belong

We all want to feel included – in our personal lives, and also at work. When employees feel that they belong, everyone benefits. Research conducted by Harvard Business Review with BetterUp found that high belonging was linked to a whopping 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and a 75% reduction in sick days. For a 10,000-person company, this represents annual savings of more than $52 million. Unfortunately, many companies fail to make their employees feel included, resulting in greater attrition. One survey’s findings suggest that nearly half of employees in the U.S. have left a job because they didn’t feel like they belonged, and over a third have quit because they had difficulty connecting with colleagues. 

Behavioral science research reveals a similar trend. Even more so than outright harassment or bullying, social ostracism in the workplace predicted worse employee wellbeing, less employee engagement, and higher turnover rates three years later. BetterUp also conducted a behavioral experiment with over 2,000 live participants to measure the costs of exclusion. Workers were assigned to a team with two other “participants” (bots programmed to act like teammates) to play a collaborative virtual ball-toss game. Included workers had teammates that consistently threw them the ball, whereas excluded workers were rarely tossed the ball. After this, workers completed a simple task where they could earn money for their entire team. Again and again, excluded participants put less effort into the task than included participants, even though it meant sacrificing their own earnings as well. Excluding others causes them to give less effort to their teams.

So how do we help employees feel like they belong? One easy way to do this is to encourage employees to discuss common experiences and share their stories. A study of 9-1-1 dispatchers tested a six-week email intervention that did just this. Workers who participated in the intervention were sent a weekly email from a supervisor or department leader that contained two key elements: a work-related story from another dispatcher, and a prompt that encouraged workers to reflect on and anonymously share a positive professional experience their peers might relate to. The results were astounding: resignation rates were cut by half just four months after the intervention concluded. When workers had a platform to give advice, share common experiences, and reflect on how their professional experiences could support their peers, their sense of belonging grew stronger, and turnover decreased in the process.

Key Takeaway: Give employees opportunities to share common experiences with each other 

#2 – Cultivate Emotionally Intelligent Leadership

Most organizations pick leaders or managers in part because they demonstrate general intelligence or competence. But a key type of intelligence often overlooked here is emotional intelligence. An emotionally intelligent person exhibits awareness, understanding, control, and expression of their emotions in interpersonal contexts. Employees at all levels can benefit from improving their emotional intelligence, but research shows that the emotional intelligence of team leaders is directly related to their workers’ likelihood of staying with their company. About 23% of employees’ engagement with their work is influenced by their sense of their direct supervisor’s emotional intelligence. This is in part because organizational leaders set the tone for the emotional culture of the entire workplace. In one study, managers with lower emotional intelligence were also more likely to cultivate a negative, unempathetic organizational culture. As a result, employees of these managers were 38% more likely to intend to resign in the next six months.

Improving managers’ emotional intelligence may seem like no small feat, but a few simple nudges can encourage leaders to be more aware, in control, and expressive of their feelings. One way to do this is to encourage managers to use more emotionally intelligent language when they communicate with their team. One study found that when supervisors used supportive, empathetic language and emphasized the unique value of each employee to contribute to their organization’s mission, this fostered a more positive organizational culture. Whether or not supervisors used this sort of language accounted for 30% of employees’ feelings of connectedness to the organization. Understanding and encouraging communications from leaders can radically improve workers’ relationship to their organization.

Another way to cultivate a more emotionally intelligent workplace is to prompt people to write about their feelings surrounding their work. Researchers in one experiment used this technique and tested whether it helped workers feel more in control and aware of their emotions. Participating employees wrote about their feelings and thoughts connected to their last workday or an especially important workday in the past for 20 minutes a day over a three-day period. The prompt encouraged workers to reflect in writing on how they could effectively perceive, use, understand, and regulate emotions in themselves and others in workplace contexts. Two weeks later, employees who participated in the intervention scored 15% higher on emotional intelligence metrics compared to employees who wrote about neutral, non-work experiences. The intervention also reduced reported experiences of workplace hostility and exclusionary behavior, showing that emotional intelligence can cultivate a culture of belonging, which, as we’ve discussed, is critical for reducing turnover.

Key Takeaway: Encourage leaders (and team members) to reflect on, write about, and communicate their work-related emotions with empathy and understanding

The Bottom Line

Creating a workplace of empathy pays off for businesses. The top 10 companies in the 2015 Global Empathy Index increased in value more than twice as much as the bottom 10, and generated 50% more earnings. The virtues of empathy are even more pronounced when it comes to reducing the costs associated with high turnover and low employee engagement. According to a Businessolver survey, 60% of employees in the U.S. would be willing to take slightly less pay, and 77% would be willing to work longer hours, if their employer showed empathy, but 78% would leave an employer for equal pay if the other company was empathetic.

Research in behavioral science shows that companies can make their workplace more empathetic in two key ways: promoting a greater sense of belonging among employees and higher emotional intelligence among leaders. These two components of an empathetic workplace can be improved with simple but effective practices. Giving workers the space to share and discuss common experiences can generate a greater sense of belonging and connection with their coworkers and the company. Encouraging management to use empathetic language in their team communications helps workers feel respected and valued, and prompting employees at all levels to reflect on and write about their feelings surrounding their work helps everyone be more aware and in control of how their emotions impact others in the workplace.

It may seem daunting to try to change your business’s entire culture to one of empathy. But small interventions and changes like the ones mentioned above can go a long way in service of this goal, while dropping turnover rates in the process – a nice side-effect to making your company a place where everyone feels they are included and understood.

Ready to increase Empathy?

Empathable uses immersive design to improve empathy in teams of all sizes.

A Path Towards An Empathic Culture

Here’s an interesting statistical coincidence.

In 2021, a year with a 57% turnover rate (according to the National Bureau of Labor Statistics), 57% of people who quit their jobs did so because of their direct managers.

What’s going on with management? Considering that toxic culture is ten times more likely to predict turnover than compensation rates, (according to the MIT Sloan Review) it should be clear that a lack of empathy is contributing in no small way to the great resignation. 

After all, 97% of employees believe empathy is essential for a healthy workplace culture (Society for Human Resource Management). When there is a strong culture of empathy, this leads to:

  • A 56% increase in job performance
  • A 50% drop in turnover risk
  • A 75% reduction in sick days.

Designing empathic leadership programs is multifaceted. We at Empathable with some of the top minds in their fields to understand how to ‘experientialize’ empathy well. 

So there’s plenty to talk about when it comes to designing a pathway to empathic culture, but today I want to focus on an easy takeaway that you can begin to apply the moment you finish reading this.

DEI needs to stop giving people the impression that their perspectives are wrong. Even when they are.

I’ve led thousands of DEI, Empathy, and Belonging trainings. And I’ve tried countless times to tell team members at a company what is right and wrong, be it their approach to inclusive terminology, their understanding of implicit bias, or the way they consider their own privilege. I have told people flat out, politely and not, that they’re wrong. 

I have also many times in training tried as empathically, gently, and graciously as possible to help people see another perspective when their own perspective might unknowingly contain harmful biases towards their marginalized colleagues.

I’ve emerged on the other side of this experience with the realization that Empathy, Belonging, or DEI trainings that attempt to tell people what to think, or that they’re wrong, simply do not work. Or at least, not often enough to make it worth it. 

So I’ve stopped entirely. I do almost nothing when these harmful perspectives are shared. And I think this approach within training, can be revolutionary.

In our immersive experiential trainings, we share real moments in real people’s lives. Once in a while, a participant in a training will sincerely state, with genuine intentions, something that sounds like this:

“We all have a fair chance. Why should employees of color receive special treatment?”

“By talking about George Floyd and racism at work, aren’t we making it worse?”

“It’s hard for me to remember someone’s pronouns. It feels like that’s asking a lot.”

These are statements I still hear with new clients – and I no longer correct them.

If this seems highly contradictory to most trainers and to the idea of being an advocate, I get that. You might even be outraged by the thought that we shouldn’t correct such statements – and that outrage would be very understandable. After all, letting harmful viewpoints slide can feel like being complicit in upholding the attitudes of unjust and inequitable systems.

Our journey at Empathable has led us to an understanding of the distinction between a non-response and simply being passive. It’s entirely possible for them to be one and the same, but here’s what I do to make sure they’re not. 

I let other members of their team in the training who are different from them share their own perspectives. We’ve designed our experiences to enact this diverse perspective sharing without us having to ask, making it voluntary, which works very well. When it’s a homogenous group of people, I’ll share the perspective of other diverse people I’ve met, being explicit that I’m not implying this perspective is more valid than theirs.

Then I wait. 

Most of the time, this results in them coming to a realization themselves, on their own, in their own time. It works like a charm. 

We may be one of the only DEI, Belonging, and Empathy programs out there that doesn’t tell people they’re wrong. I’m reminded of a statement by the renowned psychologist and relationship expert Esther Perel: “You can be right, or you can be married.”

I also think about the social scientific understanding that it’s important to create space for uncertainty when encouraging greater interest in the perspectives of others, and what many think of as “empathy.” When we tell people they’re wrong, we can eliminate the opportunity for uncertainty to develop into curiosity. 

In their paper Interest Development and Its Relation to Curiosity, psychologists Suzanne Hidi and K. Ann Renninger define curiosity as “the motivation to close a knowledge gap driven by uncertainty.” They also state, “when an existing, more developed interest initiates […] curiosity, continued engagement (and information search) is likely.”

Practically speaking, we can understand through our own life experiences that people aren’t always ready to hear the things we’re saying to them, and trying to convince them of a belief that contradicts their experience will often lead them to shut down. The dangerous result is that they check out of continued learning.

Why is being told we’re wrong so harmful to learning in general?

In the theory of experiential learning, first developed by David Kolb in 1984 (Experiential Learning: Experience As The Source Of Learning And Development), Kolb argues four steps occur every time we learn something new: experiencing, reflecting on the experience, learning from the experience, and acting based on what you’ve learned. The theory also suggests that someone can enter or exit at any stage, but for meaningful learning to occur, all four stages must be experienced.

Each of the above steps can require painstaking mental awareness, which explains why major shifts can be so difficult. Simply put, it takes a lot of work to discover something new.

Being told we’re wrong can be particularly harmful in DEI work. In a paper entitled “Against comfort: Political implications of evading discomfort,” Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic states, “We are drawn to people in whose company we feel comfortable and avoid situations and people that make us uncomfortable… visceral gut feelings like discomfort are not merely private emotional experiences but in a certain sense collective and public.”

Being told we’re wrong is an uncomfortable feeling. This discomfort can be tangled up in larger social topics like race and gender, so when someone’s viewpoint is challenged, this can have a collective burden attached to it. This discomfort can at times tap into and represent a widely held cultural misunderstanding. In other words, the individual who suggests that talking about George Floyd and racism is just making the situation worse isn’t only speaking for themselves; they’re speaking for a collective discomfort they have experienced, consciously or not, prior to the moment you find them in. So in a sense, you’re not arguing with an individual’s discomfort in a particular moment –  you’re trying to take on a collective burden this person doesn’t even realize they’re carrying.

Instead, when we allow space for what they have to say, our lack of pushback allows them to feel their worldview is more connected to ours. This concept is the backbone of empathetic learning. When we let the person know that we hear what they’re saying, or even thank them for sharing, we are building a bridge between our two perspectives. This can often lead to a shift – perhaps not immediately, but later on in the experience they might mention something that they learned, something that led them to feel there was greater nuance to a topic and caused them to revisit their earlier viewpoint.

By the end of our sessions, or in follow-ups, people will come back and say things like,

“I was talking with a Black colleague after the training, and I asked her her perspective, which made me realize something I didn’t before.”

Or

“I didn’t realize how easy it can be to correct myself when I get someone’s pronouns wrong.”

You’ll notice that in those two statements, two things have happened:

  1. People are learning through their own life experiences. These experiences are necessary to assimilate the new perspectives they’ve encountered within our immersive learning program.
  2. When they self-correct, they don’t actually verbalize that they were wrong to begin with. But they’ve learned and become more empathetic.

People are much more comfortable teaching themselves than being told what to do. The book, How People Learn, put out by The Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning, describes this as the power of intrinsic motivation – a process where people are motivated to learn out of their own curiosity. The most impactful learning occurs not in didactic environments, where the  teacher imparts knowledge to the student, but where students are able to arrive at the knowledge themselves. By validating participants’ emotions and opinions, you can offer a comfortable place for them to explore diversity and reach their own conclusions. 

Of course, we’re not advocating for people not to speak up when a colleague says something unintentionally racist, sexist, or genderist. In our theory of change on shifting organizational bias, we talk about how important it is to have two people in every room speaking up. But in these moments, the person speaking up is not a trainer, but a colleague.

Allowing empathy to emerge is especially powerful when it occurs in an immersive experience. Rather than being told what is right or wrong, participants are asked to see another perspective. This observational lens allows them to more easily fill in the space between their subjective truth and that which they are experiencing. 

We once held a program at a municipality in the south. During an immersive experience around the idea of taking and holding physical space, we shared the real-life example of a white person not moving out of the way for a person of color on the sidewalk. Afterward, her companion, a Black woman, pushed her way through a couple taking up the whole sidewalk, and said,

“Watch where you’re going”

Then to her friend, whose shoes you’re walking in as a participant, she said,

“You see, it’s important to take up space. Because you do belong here.”

After the experience, a white participant spoke up immediately and said, “Well, I think that was just rude! I move out of the way for people all the time.” 

It would have been tempting here to develop some racial context around their comment to explain what they didn’t understand. Instead, we just gave space for the viewpoint to exist, free of our own contextualization. 

A week later, during a follow-up, the same person came back and said,“I still don’t know how I feel about that experience, I still think it was rude, but I do notice it’s changed the way I take up space on the sidewalk. I’m much more aware of it now.”

They came back with greater clarity on how their reality intersects with those around them because they were given room to connect the dots themselves. 

When we’re not very familiar with a topic, it will almost always take us longer to process information. Our lab director, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, in her book, Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, tells us, “The most expensive tasks that brains do are (1) moving your body and (2) learning something new. They have a metabolic cost that may feel unpleasant. So, feeling bad doesn’t always mean that something bad happened. You might just be doing something really hard.”

A hard thing, like an inner revolution of the biased tyranny of the mind in a well-meaning colleague: well, that might take, at the very least, letting them sleep on it.