Imagine this. You’re sitting in your office. Your inbox is full, deadlines are stacked, and your colleague across the table is clearly frustrated, though they are trying not to show it. You could push the conversation along, stick to the agenda, and move on with your day. Or you could pause, ask one question, and actually listen to what is sitting underneath the surface.
Nothing dramatic happens in that pause, though. There is no breakthrough or a ‘grand burst of emotion’. Your colleague does not suddenly unload their entire life story. We can leave that stuff to the movies. But the room changes slightly, the tension drops a notch, and you notice what has been weighing on them is not the task itself, but the pressure around it.
This is what empathy is all about. That moment is easy to miss because it does not announce itself. There is no obvious problem to solve nor a visible issue to resolve. Yet those small, unremarkable interactions shape how people experience their work far more than formal policies or performance reviews ever will. When empathy is absent, frustrations tend pile up quietly. When it is present even briefly, though, even a heap of work feels more manageable.
Why Empathy Is Suddenly Getting Attention
Empathy has always existed in workplaces, but it was rarely named or rewarded.
For years, productivity was measured through output alone, and emotional awareness was treated as something personal rather than professional. That separation no longer holds. Work today is faster, more interconnected, less monotonous, and more exposed to pressure from all directions. Teams juggle competing priorities, tighter timelines, and constant change in today’s hyper-focused workplaces, turbocharged by AI.
In that environment, ignoring how people are coping does not make work more efficient, as the cynics would make you believe. Rather, to the contrary, ignoring it creates damaging blind spots. Empathy helps fill those gaps by giving professionals better information about what is actually happening beneath the surface.
This is true across industries. In healthcare, empathy influences patient trust and clinical outcomes. In business, it affects communication, retention, and leadership effectiveness. In both settings, it reduces friction that would otherwise slow everything down.
What Empathy Looks Like in Practice
Empathy at work rarely announces itself in any grand or cinematic way, and it seldom looks like the version people imagine when they hear the word. It is not a heartfelt monologue that suddenly fixes the room, and it definitely does not play out like an episode of The Office where everything goes off the rails before resolving itself in twenty minutes. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a boss like Michael Scott after all!
In real life, empathy shows up in much quieter moments, like realising that the silence that just settled over a meeting probably means no one quite understands what is being asked, rather than everyone being in full agreement.
People who work like this also tend to gain influence without ever explicitly trying to. Their communication lands better because it is clearer and less charged. Their feedback feels easier to absorb because it does not come wrapped in assumption or judgment. Over time, others start to seek them out, include them in conversations, and trust their judgement, not because they are the loudest voice in the room, but because interactions with them simply feel easier and more productive than the alternative.
Empathy and Career Advancement
As professionals move into more senior roles, the importance of empathy increases rather than fades. Technical competence remains important, but leadership increasingly depends on influence, judgement, and the ability to guide others through uncertainty.
People who demonstrate empathy tend to build stronger working relationships. They are trusted with responsibility because others feel comfortable raising concerns early. Over time, this trust often translates into leadership opportunities, particularly in fields where collaboration and care are central. In healthcare, empathy is closely tied to professional growth.
Mental health roles, in particular, require a deep understanding of human experience alongside clinical expertise. For nurses looking to specialise in mental health while enhancing their empathetic skills, online PMHNP programs provide flexible training that fits around a busy schedule, allowing professionals to advance without stepping away from practice.
Empathy in a Digital Workplace
As more work moves online, empathy becomes both more difficult to express and easier to forget entirely.
Digital communication strips away all the tone and non-verbal cues. It usually looks more like Mark from HR sending a perfectly reasonable one-line message that says, “Can we chat later?” and then disappearing for three hours. While the message was concise, it lacked context. There was just enough information to send the recipient spiralling through every possible mistake they might have made in the last six months.
In a physical office, that same message might have come with a quick smile, a shrug, or a casual “nothing urgent” on the way past. Online, it lands cold and does far more emotional work than it ever needed to. What might have been a raised eyebrow or a quiet hesitation in a physical room turns into silence on a screen, and silence is notoriously easy to misinterpret when everyone is busy and distracted.
Empathy is gaining recognition because workplaces have become more demanding, not because they have become sentimental. People are expected to do more with less margin for error, and ignoring the human side of that equation no longer works.
The professionals who take empathy seriously tend to navigate pressure more effectively, lead more sustainably and honestly, and progress further over time. At the end of the day, in environments where work and human complexity intersect, empathy often makes the difference between teams that merely function and teams that actually hold together.