Empathic leaders will motivate, retain, and ensure more productivity from their employees, several hiring managers said.

The Covid era showed managers that employees have varied experiences and living situations that impact their work, as well as their colleagues. This topic remains at the forefront for many employers, says Shelby Stewart, news editor of Houstonia, who moderated a panel titled “Employing the Skills of Empathic Leadership to Unlock Employee Potential and Life Productivity” at From day One’s 2023 live conference in Houston.

Being aware of an employee’s needs and challenges can help them perform better.

“It simply means that we lead from a place of humanity that we view our employees as human beings and not robots, not machines, not workhorses,” said A. Denise Malloy, global vice president, diversity and inclusion at Johnson Controls. “We view each employee as an individual that's unique, that has a unique set of attributes and a unique set of contributions that they will make to the organization.”

Giving employees recognition, rewards, and a path for advancement are all crucial, Malloy says.

“It is my job and responsibility as your leader to give you the development and coaching that you need,” she explained. “When you find an empathic leader who really cares and who's committed to the growth and the development of their employees, then you'll find that your employees will thrive. They'll be more productive, they'll be more loyal, and they'll produce better outcomes.”

Acknowledging employees for their efforts is “just low-hanging fruit in every corporate environment,” Malloy said. “It takes very little to give an ‘attaboy’ to tell someone that they did a good job. But yet for some of us, it's not our natural bent.”

Managers should avoid making assumptions about their employees, said Pedro Neiva Botelho, human resources director, total talent management at Schlumberger.

“We started to realize how many assumptions we were making on a day-to-day basis in many of the situations that we have in life and in our personal lives, as well,” he said. “As we went through Covid, we started entering much more into the personal lives of our people and our colleagues on our teams and realized how many of those assumptions actually weren't reflecting some of the initial understandings that we had.”

By not making as many assumptions about generations, cultures, and genders, managers can avoid putting people into various categories that are not always accurate, Botelho says.

Some managers were making assumptions based on an employee’s generation–for example, concluding that younger generations, such as Millennials and Gen Z, would be “thrilled the most in regards to hybrid work or working from home,” he said.

After receiving feedback from some employees, he learned that many of them found it challenging to work from smaller apartments, where they lacked an office and often completed their work from a kitchen table.

“One of the specificities of empathic leadership and the nature itself of empathy is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and be able to view the situations through that lens,” he said.

During the pandemic, when CEOs and managers showed, via online video conversations, that they were dealing with life experiences similar to those of their employees, it resonated with workers, says Julie Hulet Keller, executive human resources director, Baker Hughes.

“Whenever there's any important initiative in any organization, people are going to look at the top-level leaders,” she said. “One of the things that we saw in our company that I think was just so impactful is that CEOs of our business divisions would show up on camera, in their homes, with their kids around, with their pets around, really showcasing that they have a life, also.”

Employers should not, at this point, ask their workforce to compartmentalize their personal lives, since personal matters were often intertwined with professional ones during the pandemic.

“What has resonated from an empathic standpoint is that we aren't asking people to undo that now,” Keller said. “I think the best-case scenario is that we figure out ways to move forward.”

Managers must provide flexibility to their employees, open the lines of communication, and continue to provide psychological safety to promote inclusivity, says Debi Yadegari, founder and CEO, Villyge.

“In order to drive belonging in our organizations, we need to see employees for their full selves, not just how they look on the outside,” she said. “What kinds of invisible handicaps might managers be dealing with? How do we provide organizations with the skills to do that?”

Being an empathic leader means taking the time to speak with employees, as 49% of people report that they have left jobs because their managers failed to support them personally, Yadegari says.

“That's a huge statistic that basically means five out of 10 high-performing employees have left a job at some point during their career because the manager didn't show up for them personally,” she said.

A leader “who shows up” will receive ten times the effort back from an employee, Yadegari said.

Empathic leadership needs to trickle down within an organization and is “not just kumbaya. It really drives productivity forward and creates organizations of care,” Yadegari said. “And when managers and companies care, employees care even more about their work.”

Morale in the workplace can improve through coaching, mentoring, and acknowledging the needs and goals of employees, says Hailey Herleman, vice president of client partnerships, BetterUp.

Data from research says that 60% of employees are languishing, while 55% “of us are just not as awesome as we want to be,” Herleman said. Acknowledging the fact that it is normal to have lower expectations about work will normalize the discussion.

“Acknowledgment makes a big difference,” Herleman said. “From our research, we know you can grow, you can achieve, and you can get to where you're thriving.”

Ellen Chang is a freelance journalist who is based in Houston and writes articles for U.S. News & World Report, TheStreet, Kiplinger’s and Bankrate. Her byline has appeared in national business publications, including USA Today, CBS News, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.