Tech entrepreneurs often tell Maëlle Gavet that empathy is a weakness in business – that kindness hinders difficult decisions, or that hurt egos and feelings are a necessary cost to changing the world.
Gavet couldn’t argue anymore. “If you define corporate empathy as the ability of a company and its leadership to understand what’s going on in the world around them – and how their decisions affect people inside and outside the company – I think you actually have one better company, “he said of the 42-year-old tech manager, speaker and author during a panel discussion and Q&A at the Fast Company Innovation Festival on Wednesday.
And she should know: Gavet, a former Priceline executive and CEO of Ozon, Russia’s version of Amazon, wrote a book on corporate empathy trampled by unicorns last Tuesday: The Empathy Problem of Big Tech and How to fix it. Many tech companies, she said, work hard to take care of their employees – and many have empathetic people working for them. None of that is enough, she argued: “It has to involve your customers, and it has to involve your local community and your community in general.”
Gavet, who most recently served as chief operating officer at New York-based real estate startup Compass, described Facebook as the epitome of an immoral company because it was apparently unable to make decisions that benefit anyone other than Facebook itself. A reverse example, she said, is Nike, which last month used employee feedback to launch a range of sporty maternity wear – and sold out quickly.
“Empathy and people orientation are actually good for business,” said Gavet. “I’m a capitalist. I’m not telling all of these companies to become non-profit. I’m just saying that if you want a company that will be around 20, 50, 100 years from now, you have to do it.” Take into account the well-being of the world you rely on. “
Such a transformation is unlikely to happen overnight. Still, Gavet recommended three measures for any company – technical or otherwise – that wants to improve:
1. Rewrite your job descriptions.
Empathy requires access to a variety of life experiences, and standard job descriptions tend to attract the same types of applicants. Work to find candidates who speak to others, understand different points of view, and can apply them to their work – whether they are designers, engineers, or anything in between.
2. Reward employees for behavior and results.
Most companies, Gavet said, give out promotions or increases based on results only – so idiots can climb through the ranks. “Your behavior is important,” she noted. “I am consistently shocked by the number of companies that only reward employees based on results.”
3. Ethical oversight of the institute.
In universities, research projects are led by ethics regulators, but there are no such requirements in the business world. “When an engineer starts a test, it should be discussed with someone who is not looking at it from a pure code perspective,” said Gavet. “Is it ethical? Should we actually test this?”
Comments are closed.