Wellbeing & Self

Empathy at work: What it is, why it matters, what it costs

Bülent AdaPrincipal Psychologist & Director · 8 min read · Published 15 Oct 2022

Empathy has had an odd decade at work. It appears in values statements, leadership frameworks and job ads, usually as an unarguable good. Precisely because it is unarguable, it often means very little by the time it reaches a team meeting. “Be more empathetic” is advice roughly as actionable as “be more interesting”.

Which is a shame, because the underlying research is genuinely useful. Psychologists distinguish between several things the word “empathy” gets stretched across, and those distinctions turn out to matter enormously at work. That includes the uncomfortable question of why the most empathetic people in an organisation are often the ones closest to burning out.

Key takeaways

Empathy at work covers three different things, which are understanding another person’s perspective, feeling what they feel, and compassion with a motivation to help.
It matters because people raise problems early when they expect understanding rather than blame, and teams that feel safe to speak up learn.
Sustained exposure to other people’s distress takes a toll, including compassion fatigue and burnout, so clear thinking paired with genuine care is more sustainable than emotional merging.
In practice it means listening without immediately solving, checking your read, getting curious about behaviour, responding to practical needs and holding boundaries.
Seek support if caring about work is leaving you emotionally exhausted, through an employee assistance program, a psychologist, or your GP and a Mental Health Treatment Plan.

Three different things we call empathy

Most workplace confusion about empathy dissolves once you separate three related capacities.

Cognitive empathy means accurately understanding another person’s perspective, situation or state of mind. This is a thinking skill: working out what something is like for someone else.
Affective empathy means actually feeling something of what the other person feels. Their distress produces distress in you.
Compassion means feeling for someone rather than with them, coupled with a motivation to help.

That last distinction is not academic hair-splitting. Neuroscientists Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki have argued that empathy and compassion are distinct states with different consequences: sharing someone’s suffering directly can tip into what they term empathic distress (an aversive, self-focused state associated with withdrawal and poor wellbeing), whereas compassion is associated with warmth, concern and approach behaviour.¹ In their framing, empathy that isn’t transformed into compassion tends to burn the person feeling it.

For workplaces, this reframes the goal. You are not trying to build teams of people who absorb each other’s emotional states. You are trying to build teams where people understand each other accurately and respond constructively. That is a very different, and far more sustainable, thing.

Why it matters more than it sounds

The strongest business case for empathy at work isn’t a wellbeing argument at all. It runs through psychological safety, Amy Edmondson’s term for a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.² In her foundational 1999 study of work teams, Edmondson found psychological safety predicted learning behaviour: whether people actually ask questions, admit mistakes, raise concerns and seek feedback.² Teams that felt safe learned; teams that didn’t, quietly failed to.

The practical link is direct. People raise problems early when they expect to be met with understanding rather than blame. In a psychology practice, in a hospital, on a construction site or in a finance team, the cost of an unspoken concern is the same: a small fixable thing becomes a large unfixable one. Empathy is one of the mechanisms by which a team becomes the kind of place where the small thing gets said out loud.

Worth naming clearly, though: psychological safety is not comfort, and it is not the absence of disagreement. Edmondson’s teams argued. What they didn’t do was punish each other for speaking.

The part that gets left out: empathy has a cost

Popular workplace writing treats empathy as a resource you can simply decide to have more of. Anyone who has worked in a caring, clinical, emergency or client-facing role knows better.

Sustained exposure to other people’s distress carries a genuine occupational cost. The term compassion fatigue, introduced into the trauma literature by Charles Figley, describes the gradual erosion of empathic capacity in people who care for the suffering: the emotional flatness, cynicism and depletion that can follow.³ Related concepts include vicarious trauma and burnout, which the World Health Organization classifies in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon characterised by exhaustion, mental distance from one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy.⁴

This is where the empathy-versus-compassion distinction earns its keep. Advice to “feel more” is, for someone already saturated in other people’s pain, actively harmful. The more useful direction is often the opposite: enough distance to think clearly, paired with genuine care about the person’s wellbeing. That combination is sustainable. Emotional merging is not. If you are recognising yourself in this section, our page on stress and burnout goes into the recovery side in more depth.

What empathy actually looks like in practice

Stripped of the poster language, workplace empathy is a set of ordinary behaviours that can be learned and practised.

Listen without immediately solving

The reflex to fix is well-intentioned and frequently mistimed. Jumping to solutions signals that the difficulty has been processed and filed, when the person is often still describing it. A single question resolves the ambiguity in about four seconds and saves a great deal of mutual frustration: “do you want help thinking this through, or do you just want me to hear it?”

Check your read rather than assuming it

Cognitive empathy is a skill of accuracy, and accuracy requires verification. “It sounds like the deadline isn’t the real problem here. Is that right?” invites correction. Confidently narrating someone else’s inner life back at them, by contrast, is a fairly reliable way to make them feel less understood, not more.

Get curious about behaviour that annoys you

Think of the colleague who is defensive in every review, the manager who micromanages, the team member who has gone quiet. All of it is behaviour with a history. Empathy at work is mostly the discipline of asking “what would make a reasonable person behave this way?” before settling on “because they’re difficult”. You may still need to address the behaviour. You’ll address it far more effectively.

Respond to the practical need, not just the feeling

Understanding that a colleague is overwhelmed and doing nothing about their workload is not empathy; it’s observation. Compassion carries a motivation to act. Often the act is small: reassigning one task, extending one deadline, saying “you don’t need to reply to this tonight”. It communicates more than any amount of sympathetic listening.

Hold boundaries: they’re part of the skill, not a failure of it

You can care about someone’s situation without taking it home, and without becoming the person everyone offloads onto. Managers in particular need to be clear about where their role ends and where professional support begins. Being a warm manager is valuable; being an unqualified therapist for your direct reports helps no one, least of all them.

Empathy between colleagues in a workplace

The Australian context: this is now a safety duty

There is a regulatory dimension worth knowing. Under the model work health and safety laws adopted across most Australian jurisdictions, employers have duties relating to psychosocial hazards, meaning workplace factors that can cause psychological harm, including high job demands, low support, poor workplace relationships, bullying and exposure to traumatic events.⁵ Safe Work Australia’s model Code of Practice on managing psychosocial hazards at work sets out how those risks should be identified and controlled.⁵

The implication is that a supportive, low-blame culture has stopped being purely a matter of leadership style. Poor support and hostile relationships are recognised hazards, and managing them sits alongside managing physical risk. Empathy, in this framing, isn’t a soft extra. It’s part of how a workplace discharges a legal obligation.

When to seek support

It’s worth speaking to someone if you notice that caring about work has started to cost you: emotional exhaustion that a weekend doesn’t touch, growing cynicism or numbness towards people you’re meant to support, dread before shifts, or difficulty switching off from other people’s problems at home. These are common in caring, clinical, emergency and client-facing roles, and they respond well to support, especially if addressed before they become entrenched.

Many Australian workplaces fund an Employee Assistance Program, which gives staff a small number of confidential, no-cost sessions with a psychologist. If your employer has one, using it is not an admission of anything; it’s a benefit you’ve already earned. You can also see a psychologist privately without a referral, or ask your GP about a Mental Health Treatment Plan for Medicare rebates.

If you are in crisis, please don’t wait for an appointment. Lifeline is available 24/7 on 13 11 14, and 000 in an emergency.

Frequently asked questions

Can empathy actually be learned, or is it a personality trait?

Both, to a degree. People differ in their natural empathic tendencies, but the components that matter most at work (perspective-taking, accurate listening, checking assumptions, responding usefully) are behaviours, and behaviours improve with deliberate practice and feedback. Nobody needs a personality transplant to become a better colleague.

Isn’t too much empathy a problem for managers who have to make hard calls?

Empathy and accountability aren’t opposites, though empathic distress and accountability often are. A manager overwhelmed by how a decision will feel may avoid it altogether, which usually produces a worse outcome for everyone. Understanding someone’s situation clearly, communicating a difficult decision with care, and still making it, is the combination worth aiming for.

What’s the difference between empathy and compassion fatigue?

Compassion fatigue is the depletion that follows prolonged exposure to others’ suffering, most common in caring and clinical roles. Notably, the research suggests it’s more closely linked to absorbing distress than to caring itself. That is why practitioners are often taught to cultivate warm concern with some emotional separation, rather than to feel less.

How can a workplace build this at a team level rather than individually?

Culture follows what leaders model and tolerate. The reliable levers are unglamorous: leaders admitting their own mistakes, treating raised concerns as useful rather than disloyal, responding to bad news without shooting the messenger, checking workloads honestly, and having a genuine escalation path when someone is struggling. Training helps, but only where the behaviour above it is consistent.

If you’d like support building this into how your organisation actually works, Mind Health provides workplace psychology and EAP services from Parramatta and via telehealth Australia-wide, and individuals are always welcome to request an appointment directly.

References

Singer, T., & Klimecki, O. M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875–R878.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Figley, C. R. (Ed.). (1995). Compassion Fatigue: Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder in Those Who Treat the Traumatized. Brunner/Mazel.
World Health Organization. Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
Safe Work Australia. Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work.