Managing with Empathy: Why It’s Not Just for COVID Times
The COVID-19 pandemic has called on employers to act with great agility to secure the safety of their workers, alter their operations and safeguard the economics of their businesses. Understanding the difficult, far-reaching and sometimes tragic impact of the virus on employees and society, employers have made empathy their default mode. They’ve prioritized keeping employees working and assisting those facing unavoidable job loss; they’ve adapted and expanded time-off and flexible working policies; and they’ve emphasized support for health and well-being. We saw evidence of this support in some early results from our National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans: a significant number of sponsors are adding benefits in 2021 – for example, 20% will expand behavioral health benefits and 27% will add virtual health care resources. And, compared to past years, remarkably few – just 18% -- will seek to manage health benefit spending next year by shifting cost to employees through higher deductibles or other cost-sharing provisions.
Still, it’s fair to ask what will happen when business and society move past the pandemic. To what extent will – or should -- these changes be permanent? That’s the question raised and answered in Will Companies Remain Empathetic After the Coronavirus?,an article by Mercer’s Ilya Bonic and Kate Bravery. The authors contend that the pressures of the pandemic have accelerated a few fundamental changes already underway – most notably, the transformation of work by technology and artificial intelligence and an increasingly expansive view of organizational purpose. In this new environment, they say, empathy will be essential to success. Our Global Talent Trends Survey of 7,300 senior executives and human resource leaders identified key four trends flowing from these fundamental changes that were in motion before the pandemic -- and will continue to shape the workplace of the future:
- Greater reliance on environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics
- Reskilling as a top talent investment for business success
- Wider use of predictive analytics and workforce science (for example, to address inequities of race, gender and age)
- Focus on employee experience
You can read the article for a longer discussion of each of these trends, with survey data to back them up – it’s well worth it. The key take-away is that while we’ve recognized that empathy is critical to energize employees during the current crisis, it will be just as necessary in the changed world to which we return.