It’s tough out there, right?

The business world is “dog eat dog”; you’re “swimming with sharks”; it’s like Lord of the Flies. Buck up, buttercup!

What’s funny about the way we talk about the brutality of life in organizations is that the metaphors themselves are wrong. Dogs don’t seek out other dogs in order to eat them; unprovoked shark attacks are incredibly infrequent; and when Lord of the Flies played out in real life when a group of schoolboys was marooned on an island, they actually cooperated and helped each other. They even set one boy’s broken leg successfully.1

When we stop maligning dogs, sharks, and schoolboys, studies on human nature show us to be pretty nice beings, at the core. One large-scale study showed that in a situation where generosity was being tested, people’s first impulses were unselfish ones: When people made up their minds quickly, they were more likely to share a pot of money.2 Wanting to do the right thing is hardwired into us from infancy; babies will pick a puppet that seems to help other puppets over a puppet that seems to behave cruelly, for example.3

So, what’s going on in organizations, then? How are we adding up basically decent people into agglomerations where empathy seems to be in such short supply? Recent data shows that only 41% of employees feel like someone cares about them at work.4 Other studies show that up to 92% of people seek out empathic organizations when looking for a job.5 Do you see the profound disconnect? So many of us want to feel cared about at work yet don’t feel that anyone does care.

When so much key talent seems in short supply, how do we fix the problem and create the sorts of empathic companies where people actually want to work?

Building Organizational Empathy

Organizations have already invested a great deal of time, money, and effort in teaching executives to be more empathetic. Not a cent or a minute of that is wasted. Studies show a strong positive correlation between direct reports’ accounts of their manager’s empathy and the ratings the manager receives from their own boss.6 In other words, empathic leaders make for better leaders.

Shaping empathic leaders is thus necessary but not sufficient. There’s a wonderful saying in the leadership development world: “Clean fish, dirty pond.” The idea: You might undertake fabulous efforts to improve leaders’ behavior on a particular dimension (cleaning the fish), but at the end of the day, they get put back in an environment full of the wrong cues (the dirty pond) … and the leader is stuck in in the muck again. Your wonderfully empathic leader struggles to operate in an environment where every system, process, and decision seems to telegraph a lack of caring.

So let’s instead look at the whole ecosystem of the organization. What levers are available to actually clean out the pond? How do you make empathy the organization’s steady state? Start with these four strategies.

1. Use Employee Personas to Gut-Check Decisions

At its root, empathy isn’t complicated — it’s being able to understand how your words or actions might make someone else feel. Testing key decisions against carefully considered employee personas can simulate this way of thinking on a corporate level.

Let’s take the past few years’ return-to-office (RTO) decisions as an example. An organization that intelligently thought through a diverse and provocative set of personas representing the people who would be affected by the decision would have gleaned the right responses to the inevitable barrage of questions and objections. Leaders would have had answers for employees in cities with difficult commutes, for working parents who needed flexibility at the beginning and end of the day, for managers wondering how to best schedule their time to interact with their teams, and so on. Employees might not have loved every answer (“No, we are not going to pay for parking”), but the fact that the organization had thought through varied scenarios would have demonstrated a basic understanding that people are different — which is a building block of demonstrating empathy.

Organizations can also achieve some quick wins on the empathy front through this kind of persona testing. In the above example, asking employees not to schedule in-office meetings too close to the beginning and end of the day would help long-haul commuters, working parents, and managers alike. It’s an empathic supplement to the core RTO decision, not an unmaking of that decision.