Leadership Series
The Power of Empathy
An Important Leadership Lesson Learned through New Hire Onboarding
When I was asked about how I felt about my journey at Procore so far, I often mentioned the word “Empathy” in my answer. In the past several weeks, among all the things that I learned about the new company and the construction industry, the most memorable one is the importance of cultivating empathy in the workspace.
It is all about perspective.
To be empathic, we need to go beyond just caring for others — that is what we call sympathy. Empathy is the ability to recognize, experience, and understand the feelings of others and to see the situation from their perspective.
In a group, not everyone shares the same perspective. How the facts and information are interpreted and what is deemed important can vary in any given situation. Empathy is about getting a reading as best as you can of what they are going through and what they may be suffering from and respond appropriately to their thoughts and feelings. It is the cornerstone of building trust.
Empathizing with Employees
As shared in my previous post, Onboarding into a New Leadership Role — Remotely, getting acclimated to a new job is never easy, especially during COVID-19. Before joining Procore, as a professional with many years of industry experience, I never landed a job without any connection at a company ever since my first one at Cisco. I almost forgot how it felt like being a newbie in a completely unfamiliar environment — where I don’t know anyone and have to learn and pick up many things from scratch quickly and effectively.
Besides, this 100% remote onboarding and working style is something that most of us never experienced before, including me. Before joining Procore, I could only imagine and try to understand how new hires would handle it from the hiring manager and employer perspective. And my can-do, never-give-up, outgoing personality and professional experience that helps me succeed in the past sometimes make me lost sight of others’ perspectives. I would overlook or underestimate the struggles others with less industry experience, and different personalities might go through in such a wholly virtual and new environment.
By being a newbie in an entirely new industry this time and going through the onboarding process with a cohort, I got to experience both the excitement and anxiety of joining a new company remotely first-hand and face unfamiliar and unsettling feelings. I felt the intensity of learning new things and fighting against zoom fatigue with little downtime. It helped me realize how inadequate my understanding as a hiring manager could be in this remote working environment and how I can improve in the future. It also helped me see some genuine examples of empathy and experience its power first-hand in improving the belongings and building trust.
Genuine Examples of Showing Empathy
For many of my cohort and myself, Procore New Hire Orientation is probably the best orientation we went through during our professional careers. We considered it the best because it is designed with deep empathy towards its new employees and every detail of the orientation reflects that. It is well thought through from a new hire’s perspective and is empathic to their needs on getting acclimated to the new environment instead of following the mindset of “this is what we think would work for you.”
Here is an example that shows the company’s deep empathy towards employees. Healthcare is an essential part of employee benefits. However, it is not always intuitive for new employees to figure out what would work out the best for their families, especially those new to the career. Many companies provide a many pages-long benefit handbook and a set of pre-recorded video sessions to assist their new employees in benefits selection. New hires then have to struggle by comparing the fingerprints of different healthcare benefit options and making choices. Procore takes a different approach. Instead of leaving their new employees struggle by themselves, as most companies do, Procore HR sets up a live session to walk new hires through Procore benefits one by one and answering questions. A slack channel is also provided for people to ask questions asynchronously.
Another example is the “Get to Know Me” survey Procore did in the virtual onboarding process. In the survey, there were questions, such as:
“What would you find meaningful in being recognized for your work accomplishments?
A. Verbal acknowledgment
B. Lunch with your manager
C. Personal note or card
D. Acknowledgment in a team or department setting (in front of your peers)
E. Other: ____.”
These questions display a genuine appreciation for employees as well as respect for individual personalities and perspectives. Instead of assuming that every employee will like to be acknowledged verbally in front of their peers, the leadership team took a more empathic approach. They sought to understand what would work the best for an employee individually and recognize the contribution to make the employee feel most comfortable and valued. Such an empathic approach warmed my heart as a new employee and increased the sense of belonging.
Empathy is the cornerstone of building trust
Building trust is a top priority for a new leader. To build trust, we first need to create an environment where people feel emotionally safe so that they can come to you, discuss an issue openly and transparently, and walk away feeling understood and valued. The feeling of “My boss really gets me” or “My colleague listens and totally understands my challenges” is often the first sign of a trusting relationship starting to form.
However, creating such an environment as a new leader is not easy. Each team is made up of individuals with different personalities. When it comes to personality, you will discover various “types” of people: outgoing vs. introverted, facts-oriented vs. intuition-oriented, spontaneous vs. plan-oriented, etc. If you are a spontaneous person, you might not understand why someone spends so much time talking about a project and planning for it. You would rather just get started and jump right into execution. The plan-oriented person may need to talk things through, collect input from others, and form a solid plan with detailed step-by-step instructions before starting.
Experience can create very different perspectives as well. If you have been in software development in your professional career, you might not understand why it takes days or even weeks for a designer to develop a web app design that might seem simple to you. You would rather have software engineers start writing codes to create the web pages and figure out the design along the way. If you have had experience in design before, you would prefer spending time thinking through the design and the information architecture first and create a wireframe prototype to validate the user experience design before asking a developer to start coding.
With empathy, you will be able to see and understand the perspective that may be vastly different from you. By speaking directly to their needs, you can make them feel understood and valued, creating a trusting environment.
Cultivating empathy in the workspaces is essential to company culture. The empathy that starts at the top gets passed down through the organization to become a part of the fabric of the company — an expectation of how people are treated and valued. Pay attention to details of how we interact with employees and leverage them to demonstrate the power of empathy.
