Why Safety and Empathy Are Vital to the Health of your Organization

Building psychologically safe work environments have never been more important, and using the Three Kindnesses model of creating safety, cultivating empathy, and honoring diversity can help you in every aspect of your HR functions. Implementing deliberate acts of kindness has been shown to help with every measurable HR metric from decreasing turnover and interpersonal conflicts to improving employee engagement and job satisfaction. The Three Kindnesses concept will assist you in creating the type of safe working environment that all employees need and deserve. 

Spreading Kindness For A Safer Environment

The power of Three Kindnesses is that it is not just a “nice-to-have.” It’s a MUST HAVE. Three Kindnesses addresses a need that all employees have – the need to feel safe enough to bring their authentic selves to work. Without psychologically safe environments, organizations falter and lose good talent, but too often leadership realizes this much too late.  By working strategically and proactively to infuse kindness into your HR processes,  you’ll be ahead of the game and be much more competitive in all the ways that you want your organization to be.

Three Kindnesses believes that understanding others creates safety and makes people more likely to bring their authentic selves to work. Being safe makes us kinder and more likely to engage in acts of inclusion and belonging where we welcome everyone’s different needs, speeds, and creeds. And organizations that create inclusive cultures inspire creativity and innovation while decreasing conflict, interpersonal problems, and employee turnover. 

Three Kindness, in the form of safety, empathy, and diversity, is at the very heart of inclusive cultures that outperform, outmaneuver, and outlast other organizations that don’t prioritize their greatest asset. Their people.

Empathetic Leaders Have the Most Productive Teams

Many leaders behave in a  “just get it done” manner and worry very little about how that approach may actually hurt their cause instead of helping it.  General Eisenhower once said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want to be done because he wants to do it.”  In other words, you are more likely to get the work done by behaving empathetically and by aligning the necessary work with the values and motivations of the people doing the work.. By engaging through values, motivation, and kindness, empathy becomes your greatest leadership skill and a powerful tool of productivity.

Leaders who connect the workload to their employees’ values can minimize disengagement and maximize the passion and engagement of their teams. Cultivating empathy as part of your leadership skill set will always get you further than simply demanding blind allegiance. Kind leaders establish empathetic relationships with their people to create long-term engagement with them rather than just short-term compliance. 

Explaining  Neurodiversity 

The complex continuum of brain wiring known as neurodiversity means that not everyone’s brain, social, emotional, and physical needs, and ways of moving through the world are the same.  Understanding if you are neurotypical or neurodivergent means that you will begin to recognize the kinds of environments where you work best and the kinds of activities that energize you or drain you. Leaders who understand this get more out of their people, too!

Recognizing and honoring the spectrum of neurological wiring – from neurotypical to neurodivergent –can be life-changing because as we increase our understanding and engage empathetically around neurodiversity we begin to unlock secrets about how and why we behave the way we do.  In turn, this new self-awareness can help us become more productive, more creative, more empathetic, and more likely to understand the need to be kind to both ourselves and other people.

Learn more about three kindnesses at https://threekindnesses.com