It’s time to face it: There is a growing disconnect between employees and employers.
We saw it during the Great Resignation and then again with Quiet Quitting. While some employers were quick to disregard these trends as nothing more than “lazy” workers, these kinds of engagement issues don’t come out of nowhere—in fact, they’re just symptoms of a much larger problem.
So what’s causing this mismatch? Two words: empathy gap.
An empathy gap is commonly understood as a cognitive bias that prevents someone from understanding the perspective of another person who may be in a different mental state. Sometimes, the other person is our future selves (an intrapersonal empathy gap), other times it can be a friend, colleague, or loved one (an interpersonal empathy gap).
For example, you might wake up feeling particularly motivated one morning and go for a run. Afterward, you’re in a heightened emotional state due to all the endorphins released from your exercise, so you set a goal to run a mile every morning. The next day rolls around, and your future self becomes your present self, who can’t bear to get out of bed, much less run a full mile. Instead of rising in the morning with the energy you had the previous day, you wake up wondering why you made a commitment to yourself that you knew you couldn’t keep.
This example highlights two distinct kinds of empathy gaps:
Of course, it’s easier to forgive ourselves for a decision when we know the feelings that drove it. When it comes to interpersonal empathy gaps, we often lack the context of another person’s past actions, their current mental state, or the emotional drivers behind a behavior. This is known as egocentric bias. In the workplace, these biases can form empathy gaps among employees, causing conflict and division. More often, however, these empathy gaps form rifts between employers and employees.
According to an Ernst & Young survey, while 87% of U.S. workers agreed empathy leads to better leadership, over half of the participants (52%) felt their organization’s attempts at empathy have been inauthentic. At the same time, Businessolver’s 2023 State of Workplace Empathy Report found that only 59% of workers believe their CEOs are more empathetic than they were before the pandemic—compared to 67% of CEOs surveyed.
But what exactly does this growing empathy gap mean for businesses?