The Compassionate Instinct

Still, many organizations have neither a compassionate manager nor an environment that fosters compassion among colleagues. One financial analyst, who works for a large national bank in the San Francisco Bay Area and asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, spoke in an interview about his office environment, where employees work side by side every day but barely acknowledge each other. Having come from a smaller, more familial software company, he was surprised by the lack of camaraderie at the bank. But he soon found himself adjusting to the new environment, keeping his own natural friendliness in check. Then a coworker on his floor died suddenly over the holidays. “I expected a supervisor or someone to at least explain why he wasn’t there, but nobody talked about it. It was really weird,” he said. “I didn’t learn he’d died until I needed an office space for a new hire, and they suggested I use his.” Given the culture of his office, the incident wasn’t surprising, he said, but it made him question the heart of the organization.

Worline said that such environments take their toll on people working within them. “In extreme cases, employees leave,” she said. “But even those that stay will often quit doing the discretionary things they used to do for the organization, when they thought it cared.”

It isn’t always easy for a boss to accommodate employees, even when one is committed to demonstrating compassion. “All supervisors have to balance the needs of the corporation—which is all about money, earnings per share, and profitability—with the needs of the worker,” said Renee Knee, a senior vice president for SAP, a leading software company. She cited an example of a senior employee who had to leave the country suddenly because of a death in his family, just before the deadline of a multimillion-dollar project for which he was responsible. Though Knee gave him the time off, the ill-timed departure created extra stress in an office already under deadline pressure.

Organizations, especially businesses in competitive industries, always walk a fine line when giving employees time off in emergencies. But Worline suggests that the POS message about compassion sometimes gets misconstrued, as managers only focus on the bigger acts of compassion, such as time off and monetary gifts, which may make a big difference to workers but are not always easy to provide. “Just stopping by and listening to an employee in pain can make all the difference,” insists Worline. When giving talks to groups of managers, she tries to convey the importance of just paying attention to employees and noticing when they need help.

Worline, Dutton, and their POS colleagues recognize that problems can arise in practicing compassion at work. They note that compassionate acts must be tailored to the particular needs of each person. If a person suffers a traumatic event and wishes to remain private about it, he or she may not welcome attention or help from others, well-meaning as it might be. Programs like vacation pools, where employees donate small amounts of vacation time for coworkers in need, can create complicated ethical dilemmas: If an employee doesn’t contribute to the vacation pool, should she be allowed to dip into it herself? “Compassion, if applied differently to different employees, may create a perception of inequity,” said Worline. If applied in this spirit, it may even alienate employees, she argues.

Then there are the researchers who take issue with some of the basic objectives of POS. Ben Hunnicutt, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa, argues that efforts to make work life more rewarding and pleasurable distract from what he considers bigger goals for workers, like higher pay and shorter workweeks. Encouraging people to pursue satisfaction through work means that they’ll spend more time there and have less left for family, health, art, religion—the things, he argues, that really give meaning to people’s lives. “Work can never replace these important aspects of life, and we shouldn’t expect it to,” he said. “Instead of trying to make work better, we should all be working less.”

Dutton agrees that working less may help improve people’s lives, but she thinks American society is a long way from moving in that direction. If anything, people are working more than they used to, she said, and economic realities require people to spend more time at work. And she added that her work on compassion is not just relevant to work settings, but to organizational settings in general. The conditions that foster compassion at work apply to other contexts as well. “Whether we’re talking about work, schools, churches, or hospitals, we all spend time in organizations,” said Dutton. “POS is trying to understand how all organizations can be places of healing, where people feel alive and can flourish.”