Building Empathetic Tech Workplaces: Insights from Katherine Manning

This week, join us as we delve into the importance of empathy in the workplace with author Katherine Manning. We explore how empathy can transform your workplace, improve well-being, and navigate the challenges of layoffs and AI. Katherine, with her book "The Empathetic Workplace," guides us on creating compassionate responses to trauma.

Key Takeaways from this episode:

• Workplace Trauma: This is a complex issue with various causes. Explain its impact on employees.
• Recognizing the Signs: Describe symptoms that indicate a person may be experiencing workplace trauma.
• Where to Find Help: Offer resources like specialized therapists and employee assistance programs.
• The Role of Employers: What can organizations do to prevent workplace trauma and create supportive environments?
• Building Trust in the Workplace: Katherine discusses the 3
• C's of Trust and how they create healthier work relationships.

Transcript:

[0:00] Music.

[0:09] I'm Gina Rosenthal, CEO of Digital Sunshine Solutions.

We're a fractional product marketing agency.

And I'm Marian Newsome. I'm the founder of Ethical Tech Matters, and I'm an ethical technologist.

And here's our guest today. This is Catherine Manning. Would you want to introduce yourself? Sure. It's such a pleasure to be here with the tech aunties.

So my name is Catherine Manning. I am an author of the book, The Empathetic Workplace, Five Steps to a Compassionate, Calm, and Confident Response to Trauma on the Job.

I'm also a consultant and trainer, and I specialize in helping to build workplaces that are more human-centered and trauma-informed.

And this is why we wanted to talk to you, because we are the Tech Aunties, but we're also, we are very technical.

We are. And that's why we have the podcast, is to talk about all sorts of things that face people in IT, and that we have faced ourselves. Yes.

And I know we've got a lot of good questions for you. Yeah. And this topic is really relevant right now with all the disruption in tech, with the workforce, even the return to office policy and the impact on the workplace.

How did you get passionate about this topic and really translating that to the workplace?

So my background is that I'm a lawyer, but a lawyer who for my entire career has worked with victims of crime.

So I started off back in college doing hotline work, domestic violence, rape crisis work.

[1:36] After law school, I went to the Justice Department, the U.S.

Department of Justice, and what I did there was I was a senior attorney advisor on victims' rights, and that meant that it was my job to guide the department through its response to victims of crime, whether it be like a terrorism case, like the Boston Marathon, huge fraud like Bernie Madoff, just trying to make sure that the department knew how to support victims in each of those cases.

And a few things started to become clear to me.

One was that people didn't need different things based on what they were a victim of.

It wasn't like the way you would support a victim of fraud was all that different than the way you would treat a victim of human trafficking.

Everybody needed to feel heard and acknowledged.

[2:17] Everybody needed a little help to get on their feet again. And then I realized it wasn't just the victims in our cases who needed those things.

It was my colleagues too.

Sometimes for reasons that were work-related, like they were dealing with a really really hard matter or dealing with a really difficult person, sometimes for reasons just because they were human.

And humans sometimes are going to have experiences going through divorce or lots of a loved one.

And I just realized that these ways that we support each other at work through hard times has such a tremendous impact.

It affects individual healing and well-being.

Like, are you able to recover from what you're going through?

It affects trust between us. Because Because if I know that you supported me when I needed it, I'm going to be there for you forever.

And ultimately, are we able to meet our organizational mission?

Because if people are healthier and have better trust, we're going to be a lot more successful on everything we do.

[3:12] And so are you finding the commonalities between like the workplace and corporate policies and the impact on employees as we go through these life events?

It's very similar to the work you've done previously.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I guess let me just give you a quick example to kind of flesh out how it shows up.

So there was a time when I was at DOJ where one of my colleagues, another lawyer, he had been in one of these giant government meetings where you have like 30 people sitting around a conference table, right?

And his boss in the middle of the meeting belittled him, like made him feel really, really dumb and ashamed.

And he comes out of the meeting and he comes storming into my office and he's just pacing back and forth and back and forth in front of my desk. desk.

And I realized the way that I was talking to him was the exact same way I would have talked to a domestic violence victim on a hotline call 15 years earlier.

He needed active listening. He needed acknowledgement.

And because I was able to do that, because I had those skills, within like five minutes, he had calmed down. He could go back to work.

I could go back to work. He didn't do something really dumb like go storm into his boss's office and yell at her or fire off an email or something.

And I just realized that these issues show up all the time, you know, in big ways and small ways at work.

And if we can get better at handling them, we are going to be so much more successful on every level.

[4:36] So a lot of the companies, the attendees here at the Capital Factor are startups.

And so what advice would you give them as they start to really form their companies and get their mission and vision?

How should they look at actually building building empathetic workplaces?

I really feel like when it comes down to building an empathetic workplace or being an empathetic leader, I always say there's three pillars of an empathetic workplace. The first is acknowledgement.

That means that I will be heard here. If I say something, does anybody actually hear it? Do they just gloss over what I said?

If I'm saying there's a problem here, do people try to talk me out of it or do they actually hear what I'm saying?

Part of that is also like, do you ever say thank you?

I spoke with a woman once who was at a startup and she, what she said to me was, this was like my dream.

She said, I was so all in on this startup. I believed in the mission.

I thought I was going to die there. Like that was, I was, you know, nights, weekends, round the clock, I believe so strongly in this startup.

And she said, and then I would, after seven years, I, I suddenly realized that in the entire seven years, the two founders had never said thank you to me.

Wow. Not once. And she said, once I had that realization, I started sending out a few resumes and in a month I had a job for twice the salary. Wow.

[5:56] And probably the story those founders tell themselves is, oh, well, we couldn't have matched that salary.

But the thing is, if they had said thank you, she never would have looked in the first place.

Exactly. So that first one is acknowledgement. Just do people feel seen and valued? The second one is support.

So can I get help when I need it? What kind of policies do you have that are supporting mental health, flexible work?

The things that people need in those difficult times, do you have those policies?

And do people know about them? So you've got to talk about them frequently.

What I like to advise is actually noisy self-care.

So making sure that people know that you, too, are taking steps to protect your mental health.

Like it's one thing to say, hey, we've got phenomenal mental health resources.

Reach out if you need them. It's very different to say we've got phenomenal mental health resources and they really helped me when I needed them.

I hope you reach out if you need them.

And then the third one is trust. And this is all about, do people feel like the workplace is fair?

Do they feel like people have an equal voice in this environment?

So to me, that comes down to how are we building trust in the first place?

I think that the way you build trust in any relationship is the three Cs, clarity, consistency, and choice. choice.

So are you clear, transparent about your expectations, timelines, your needs?

Are you applying rules consistently? Are you saying everybody has to be in by nine, but you yourself roll in at 945?

[7:22] You know, like the rules have to apply the same for everybody.

And then finally, choice.

Are you giving as much flexibility as possible so that people can have autonomy over the decisions that affect their lives?

And then that final piece on trust also includes making sure that we're living our values.

[7:41] So if, for instance, you say you value creativity and inclusion and psychological safety, and you are ignoring the screamer down the hall, those aren't your values.

Everybody knows it. We have to be willing to have difficult conversations, sometimes take really uncomfortable action in order to live our values or they're not worth very much in the first place. Yeah, it's so true.

You know, I'm listening to all of this and it sounds like the ideal place to work.

But, you know, if we talk in reality, the tech industry, I think, especially right now, there are so many layoffs.

And the layoffs many times are, are they at least appear to be financially motivated.

And so they are random, can be entire units, can be two people out of every organization, but it's just out of the blue.

That person might be the core person you need there and they're gone because of whatever reason.

How can trust exist or how can people nurture themselves in an area if they're stuck in a place that.

[8:47] May not be the ideal place you described. Well, I mean, one, I just want to acknowledge that layoffs are incredibly destabilizing and traumatic.

Like it is something that you carry with you for a long time and builds in this layer of fear in you as an individual and in the whole team.

So it takes a while to come back from that. And so for anybody who has to go through that on the leadership side, I would just advise making sure that you are being as clear and upfront with with people remember clarity, consistency, choice, trying to give people as much information as possible, providing support to them through the process.

Just try to avoid, I know it's uncomfortable, but you just, you have to be upfront about the difficult choices that you're making because that's how you build trust is people will understand, listen, the numbers are what they are.

But if they feel like you're hiding the ball, or if you're calling in, you know, you're saying one thing, but actually something else is going on,

[9:43] that's going to exacerbate the the trust issues.

And then on the self-care piece, like what you can do to take care of yourself.

[9:52] So one is I do want to just say that everybody has a role in creating the workplace culture.

So it's not just like the director of, the vice president of, who's the leader in that place.

Everybody has a role in that. Like that noisy self-care I was just talking about, if you walk in and you say, well, gosh, you know, I have to turn off my phone at at nine at night, or I'm never going to get to sleep that night.

Or if you say, gosh, you know, I'm back in therapy this year.

It's made such a big difference for me.

Those things are creating the workplace culture that supports mental health.

So you don't have to be in leadership to help create the culture, but then just how you are feeding yourself.

[10:32] You know, what I generally advise is, so burnout, right?

We've talked, everybody's familiar with the term burnout, right? We know this. Yeah.

So the thing about burnout is it is sneaky, like it will sneak up on you.

It's not a light switch. Right.

It is something that builds slowly over time.

So one, we have to get better at recognizing our warning signs.

I remember talking to this woman who was the head of a team.

She's also an Asian-American woman. And we were speaking right after the shootings in Atlanta that targeted the Asian-American community there.

[11:10] And she said, I think I got to get better at recognizing my warning signs.

She had just heard me give a talk.

And she said, you know, I like I thought I was doing fine.

I was reading the news. I knew what was going on, but I thought I was handling it.

And then I was on a call with my team and I just I just lost it.

I just started screaming at them. Wow.

And she was like, I've never spoken to anybody that way, let alone at work. Wow. Mm hmm.

Have you ever heard that expression, right? The universe whispers first before it shouts.

I'm willing to bet there were a few whispers that she missed before the shouting started.

So get better at recognizing those warning signs, like things like a shorter temper, sharper edge to your sarcasm. another common one is when things that are normally fun start to feel like a burden.

Like if I have to go out to dinner with my friends and all I can think is, I have to leave the house. I'm going to have to put shoes on. What a pain.

You know, that's probably a sign. I see that a lot. I'm waiting for shoes. I know, maybe, maybe.

Oh, no. She needs better shoes. Maybe, maybe.

[12:15] I also recommend having a like a proactive plan to preserve your mental health. Right.

So like every day you are doi