Corporate Empathy: Where It Went and Why It Matters

It certainly seems like a bleak moment to be a worker in America. Scroll the news or social media and a picture forms of an uncaring, turbulent, and miserly workplace.Why is this so striking? Empathy, or the ability to understand and be sensitive to others’ feelings and experiences, became a fashionable trait in business just a few years ago. For a while, employers were getting really good at responding to the needs of the workforce. Some companies even traded on it. Empathy, as well as its more active cousin, compassion, took many forms. As more attention focused on how some demographic groups were often left on the sidelines, employers said OK, let’s find ways to level the playing field, and they set hiring goals and stood up mentorship programs. When Covid lockdown closed schools and day-care centers and quarantined babysitters, companies told workers to take care of their families and welcomed Zoom cameos from kids. When employees needed a reprieve from expensive cities and long commutes, companies converted to remote work and hybrid work. When burnout and loneliness pressed on our minds, employers started footing the bill for therapy.The year 2025 feels really different. Much of change in the weather has to do with what the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are doing to the federal workforce, gutting it haphazardly and villainizing the civil service—and how companies in the private sector are playing follow-the-leader. Meta appeared to ingratiate itself to the incoming administration by axing its DEI programs. And when President Trump ended federal DEI programs, Google and Amazon ended some of theirs. When Elon Musk fired “low performers” from the federal government, so did Meta and Microsoft. Public sector followed private sector in ending remote and hybrid work. First Amazon, AT&T, and Boeing called workers back to the office in late 2024, and the president did the same on inauguration day. Underscoring the dramatic shift: All of this is happening as we arrive at the fifth anniversary of Covid lockdowns in the U.S. In some ways, all those revolutionary changes to the way we work seem to be dissolving. To be sure, many employers insist that employee well-being is still a priority, but surveys show that most workers aren’t feeling it. According to Gallup, the percentage of employees who believe their organization cares about their well-being plunged to 21% in early 2024. At its peak in May 2020, that figure was 49%.These stories and statistics certainly make it seem like employers are pulling the plug on empathy. But while the big tech and banking companies that have toughened up their workplace policies employ a lot of people, as does the federal government, they don’t employ everyone. Do these stories really reflect what it’s like to be a worker in 2025? Is corporate empathy dead? I started asking around.When the Reality Doesn't Match the MessageAs I was working on this story, Lauren Branston, CEO of the UK-based nonprofit Institute of Business Ethics, sent me an email. “I have been hearing people I trust saying they are seeing more and more ‘campaigns’ saying empathy is bad, etc. Which I find worrying,” she wrote. “People are campaigning against a core human value. We aren’t ready for this as an institution or in society because we have assumed these topics to be settled.”For decades, she later told me in an interview, people have operated with the belief that undergirds much of Western political democracy: that those with power can largely be trusted to use that power for good, and if they don’t use it for good, then accountability, in the form of ethics or regulations, will come for them. Now, it’s not clear whether either of those things is enough to stop the rolling tide.“It’s fundamentally challenging, she said. “It’s a moment where your values and beliefs are shaken, and it’s a moment where you have to sit and recalibrate what’s going on. What you see when people’s values are challenged is engagement and collaboration and connection. People organize and get organized. And I think that might happen.”As a reporter, I talk to senior HR leaders and executives every day, and some of them I know well. It’s clear to me that a lot of these people who work in HR are, as individuals, genuinely concerned about the well-being of their colleagues. And some are really pushing for change.In February, I moderated a From Day One panel of senior talent-acquisition leaders, and all of them were insistent on providing a good candidate experience even as they introduce AI into their hiring process and navigate an unwelcoming labor marketplace. In fact, they were most concerned with finding ways to provide feedback to individual applicants, even those who don’t get the job. Comcast, which might get a thousand applications for a given role, learned that what applicants want most is feedback, so its TA team is finding ways to provide that.But when what the company says is not what the company does, a lot of HR leaders are really troubled by this. Lori Osborne is one of them. She has spent her 20-year career in HR, mostly working for corporations and startups, plus a brief stint with a non-profit organization, before leaving in 2024 to be a fractional CHRO for startups. Hypocrisy is why she left corporate HR, after finding that values and behavior just didn’t add up. Publicly, leadership would say, “‘We want you to go on a run at lunch. We want you to go to your kids’ school play. We want you to do this thing that you have a personal passion for, even though it’s during work hours,’” Osborne told me. But behind closed doors, the same leaders debated whether to promote employees who went on lunchtime runs or left early to make the school play. Taking them at their word was a trap. But this didn’t happen in the new, colder environment, it happened years ago, when it was in vogue to be a support-everyone kind of company. Which tends to confirm the worker suspicion that many companies never believed in empathy at all.What It Feels Like When the Vibe ShiftsEven so, I found employees who wanted me to know that they don’t believe corporate empathy is dead. One of them works in product development at a large, U.S.-based tech company. He wanted me to use a pseudonym—we’ll call him Terry—so he could speak candidly.Terry likes his work, which he says is creative and challenging. He also likes that expectations are clear and good work is rewarded. There have been two rounds of layoffs and a reorganization since he arrived, but Terry believes the matters were handled as well as they could have been.Primarily, he told me, empathy is evident in the fact that executives are so accessible. For two years, and especially lately, employees have asked executives during town hall meetings whether they’ll stick with DEI. The answer has always been yes. They ask whether workers will be called back to the office. The answer is no, remote and hybrid work will stay in place. As far as ratcheting up productivity expectations, the company now attaches bonuses to performance, but Terry doesn’t believe that’s meant to hector workers. It’s just what happens when revenue flattens out.But something weird happened. Recently, Terry’s new boss told him to provide weekly status updates, a requirement that sounds suspiciously close to Elon Musk’s ominous email to federal employees, ordering them to list five accomplishments for the week. I asked Terry, does that give you pause? It does, so he’s going to ask his manager why. Is he not trusted? Many workers may be harboring the same concerns, but aren’t confident enough to speak up. “Senior leadership can’t make people ask questions,” Terry told me, “but they can create an atmosphere where you can ask questions in front of everyone, or silently Slack the leadership.” So that’s what he’s going to do.What Does Empathy Have to Do With Business?It may be worth asking ourselves where we expect empathy in the workplace to come from: the executives in the C-suite who represent the business, or the colleagues we interact with on a daily basis?One employee who was recently let go from the Department of Education wrote on LinkedIn about how her colleagues went out of their way to help when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. One tech worker told me how much their manager was a mentor. Federal workers at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce have told me how they’re banding together to share resources and support. Go looking for empathy, and you’ll find it.What some employees are getting from their employers cannot be dismissed: bullying and badgering, threats and ultimatums. Really big sticks and no carrots to speak of. People are really angry about layoffs. Most people would agree this is really bad humanity. Some would argue really bad business too.Business Insider’s Aki Ito reported on how Meta’s harsh performance reviews may backfire and damage productivity rather than improve performance. “CEOs may think they’re creating a meritocracy,” Ito writes. “but in reality they’re marching their companies straight into a trap of sunken morale, high turnover, depressed profits, and reduced innovation.”There’s evidence that corporate empathy really does affect dollars and cents. Among my favorite examples is a study by a group of researchers in Switzerland and the UK. They examined 510 CEO conference calls by 448 U.S.-based companies on the Russell 3000 stock index that took place in the earliest stages of the pandemic. They found that the more CEOs made statements, even vague ones, that signaled their human concern for employees, customers, or clients, the better those companies’ stock prices fared when overall share prices plunged in March 2020. The researchers call them “human care statements.”We’ve seen the opposite happen in 2025. Tesla’s stock price has been dropping precipitously, for nine straight weeks. Much of that may be politically inspired, but Musk’s gleeful lack of empathy for workers hit by DOGE cutbacks, with references to wood chippers and chain saws, gained viral infamy.The opposite kind of behavior appears to be demonstrably beneficial and stabilizing. “Follow-up explorations unveiled a negative association between CEO human care statements and stock volatility, meaning that market participants discounted these companies’ future earnings less,” the study reads. “Our explorations suggest that it pays off for CEOs to go beyond mere financial information and show some humanity.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Featured photo by Miniseries/iStock by Getty Images)