Employee Survival Guide®

Corporate Empathy or Just Plain Old Apathetic Employment Practices

May 31, 2022 Mark Carey Season 3 Episode 9
Employee Survival Guide®
Corporate Empathy or Just Plain Old Apathetic Employment Practices
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode of the Employee Survival Guide®, Mark discusses the recent trend by employers to provide empathy training to managers.  Mark argues that this is just an attempt by companies to keep employees from jumping ship to the next employer during this employee run economy.  He further argues that what employees really want is to trust their employers and stop fearing if they will be placed on a performance improvement plan or fired without a reason. Mark argues to eliminate the employment at will rule and replace it with a "just-cause" termination rule for all employees.  This new rule would create more security and the type of trust where corporate empathy can really strive.

This episode was written and produced by Mark Carey and edited by Matt Zako.

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Hey, it's Mark here and welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide where I tell you what your employer does not want to know about and a lot more. Today we're gonna be talking about a topic that's rather important, and I've been following for some time. It's called the corporate empathy or just plain old apathetic employment practices. Corporate adoption of empathy skills training for managers and executives is not new. High Price consultants have been pushing this agenda for a while to quote a Time magazine article. outside the office. Developing Empathy means trying to understand and share the feelings or experiences of someone else. Empathy is different from sympathy, which is more one directional, you feel sad for what someone else is going through, but you have little understanding of what it feels like. Because empathy is predicated on experience, it's difficult if not impossible to cultivate. At best, its expanded sympathy at worst. It's trying to force connections between wildly different lived experiences and quote, on May 10 2022, The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled, Why is your boss asking you about your feelings inside the empathy management trend? Okay, this was a nice piece of writing post pandemic, emphasizing a new corporate face to replace the old. What piqued my interest was the glaring, obvious alter ego of corporate empathy from the pre pandemic world? That time before time, if you can remember, I was apoplectic, bordering on insanity. Why? Employee reaction to empathy training can be summed up in a tidy quote, that appeared in the Time magazine article. The article is titled, companies are embracing empathy to keep employees happy. It's not that easy. Here's a quote. Still, I've heard from workers who think it's all nonsense, the latest in a long string of corporate attempts to distract from toxic or exploitive company culture. Yet another scenario in which employers, employer, employer workers to be honest and vulnerable about their needs, then implicitly or explicitly punish them for it. And I could not agree more. Because I know too much about all the corporate garbage being thrown up the human resource resources back door and here's the dumpster. If you actually believe the latest surge in corporate empathy training is effective and will produce lasting change. You are insane. I've been monitoring the implement workplace for more than 25 years. And the reality most if not all employers and employees experience is a meditation and absolutism. autoCrat See, via the human resource Resources Department. I continue to warn employees that the human resources department is not your friend is not there to help you. Stretching stretching further out from there. Your manager is just an extension of an image of management and human resources department. Neither of which can be trusted, let alone permitted to engage in empathy with you. What about whatever issue you're dealing with? The real reason companies are pushing this empathy thing, again, is because they need employees to stay within their rank and file instead of jumping ship to the next employer. According to the two of them 21 state of workplace empathy study. Yes, there's a study for this. As reported in the Time article, only one in four employees believe their employers engaged in sufficient empathy with employees. That's pretty crappy, if you think when can we begin to trust our employers and believe the real face of real transparent corporate empathy at work? When companies remove the baffles, eliminate that will rule and let the real employment relationship again, face it employees do not trust employers based on decades, decades of maltreatment and fear mongering by employers in particular human resource departments and the corporate executive team that dictate to those departments. employees nationwide work under our state of low to moderate level of fear that their next day could be their last day. This is true for an employee at McDonald's. It's true for an employer Birdwood bridgewater associates and Goldman Sachs. Why? Because they will implement relationship. It's just that it's at will. Employers need you one day, and the very next day that puts you on a performance improvement plan for no apparent reason and then they fire you. When employers like Starbucks and Amazon realize that employees do not want unionization, but really want a higher level of trust. Trust that the employer has your back just like your family does. An employment relationship based on a termination for Just Cause can provide that level of trust between employees and management. Adjust cause implement prank provides predictability. Specifically employees can avoid certain pre identified behaviors that can lead to termination such as sexual harassment, or theft. When employees promote a just cause, implement, they create an identifiable trust. We're only true empathy can coexist. No trust, no empathy, just that simple. employers across the country are now in a unique position to forever altered the employment landscape. unionization is not the answer. I've never found any unions to be trustworthy, only paternalistic and biased in favor of their collective bargaining counterparts, employers. We have never seen a client who was part of a union represented by the union's legal team when they really needed them. What employees need to do is speak up about implementation of adjust cost termination policy, and the elimination of the implement, I will rule. This is not a progressive agenda. This is an American agenda. Everyone needs to work, but we should not have to fear our employers. The time for change is now. If you'd like more information about this topic, please contact Carey & Associates PC on the web www.capclaw.com. Have a great week.