You're listening to the HR Mixtape, your podcast with the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel, well, like work. Now, your host, Sherri Simpson. Joining me today is Jim Link, the CHRO at Shurm. Jim's career includes roles of increasing responsibility across a variety of industries and companies, including General Electric, the Pillsbury Company, Porsche Cars, and Randstand.
Jim has served as a volunteer leader in several organizations, including the Shurm Foundation Board, the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank Human Capital Advisory Board, and the Human Resources Leadership Forum. Jim, thanks for jumping on the podcast with me. Hey, thank you. It's great to be here again. My pleasure. So excited. You are doing a session here at Shurm around. You're talking about empathy as a business driver. This is such an important topic. It absolutely is.
And in the society in which we're living in today, it's becoming more and more obvious that this is a topic that all businesses and organizations need to think about in order to ensure success for themselves and their employees. So I want to start with this question. In my career, I have totally run into scenarios where maybe you're dealing with a salesperson and not to call it salespeople, but maybe you're dealing with a salesperson who's meeting their KPIs and they're just killing it.
Week over week, year over year. But they are terrible when it comes to people skills. And we can never get to that conversation about empathy. How do we get to that? How do we help change the narrative that KPIs aren't the only thing that should be driving our business? It's happening rather organically these days.
Matter of fact, there's a lot of research going on right now in both academic environments, but also in business environments, where that people are really understanding how you move from shareholder value to stakeholder value. And that movement clearly involves things like understanding the role you want to play in the community, the role you want your employees to play around empathy and caring and well-being and the management of other people.
And honestly, what's brought all this forward has been the polycrisis that we've been dealing with in the world in the last three or four years. None of it has brought it to attention more so than the well-being and creating a culture of care in your respective organizations. So lots of things going on. Great time to be paying attention to this. And we support that idea that there's more at stake here than just a bottom line business result.
How have you seen organizations start to thrive differently when they start to introduce empathy? In a couple of ways. And it's usually related to the cultures that they wish to create. When you have an empathetic culture, you naturally get a few things as a result. You get cultures of learning, cultures of belonging, and cultures of innovation. And all three of those are vitally important for success, not just now, but certainly in the future.
And there are other outcomes you get from that as well, which is a more satisfied, engaged, happy workforce. Your ability to attract, retain, and engage employees continues to get better. And guess what? Research also shows that your business results, your customer satisfaction results, anything that you wish to choose from a business performance perspective to measure, gets better when you have high engagement and you've created those cultures in which we've described.
What kind of obstacles do you see HR professionals running into when they start to introduce or start to talk about empathy as a business driver? I could see some HR professionals going into that C-suite and saying, we're going to talk about empathy today and maybe getting some blank stares. Yeah, they will get some blank stares, but they also need to just bring in with them a few news articles and a few pieces of research.
I always encourage everyone that works in the human resources space to be better with the numbers and the research and the knowledge that you can obtain from just about any source and a lot of it free sources related to those things. So I go in with my guns loaded and with the idea that at the end of the day, it's my job to help tell a story. And I use those numbers to tell the story, to be the evidence that the story has a positive outcome and a positive ending.
And that if we pay attention to things that matter in our society today and in our companies today and that those employees are bringing those things to our attention, then that's how you overcome those initial objections. It's a sales job. You asked me a sales questionnaire. It's a sales job, right? Inside your own organization. That involves great storytelling and with a purposeful outcome. Yeah, for sure.
You know, in your session, you talked about how empathy and action partnered with learning and belonging can really create workplaces that thrive. How do you see those three things working together? We call them the culture trio and we call them the culture trio because what we've seen in practice at SHRM, but also with people with whom we work and amongst the 325,000 employers we have globally and the companies they represent, those three things tend to be part of a secret sauce for success.
Now, companies certainly measure it in different ways. They think about different ways to build those cultures within their organizations and there's no one size fits all approach. But the idea that you have that as a purposeful objective should be part of the mission, vision, and values of your organization and employees, particularly younger employees, resonate with that.
It helps them build their personal resiliency to get through days when they aren't perfect or things aren't going exactly their way. It builds the capability to learn, the ability to be entrepreneurial in an organization. When an employee at any level understands that someone cares about them and asks about how they are and can actually put themselves in their shoes, well, that builds a managerial employee connection that's hard to break.
What are some success stories that you can share either internally at SHRM or with organizations you've worked with where they've started to make this shift to talk about empathy as a business skill and the positive impacts it's had? I can tell you a couple of examples and I'll keep them general just so we don't hurt anybody's feelings here.
But some of the most interesting things I've seen in our actual customer base at SHRM, our membership base, are stories where that leaders, people at the very tip top of their organizations have shown their vulnerability. And when they've shown their vulnerability, they often talk about that on public stages in front of their employees. They videotape things if they weren't comfortable doing that and then shared that in their online methods however they do that in that particular company.
And what happens when a leader shows his or her vulnerability at that level? That ripples through an organization. Now when that does happen, you need to ensure that you're prepared for increased calls to whatever your medical services groups are or your EAPs or your employee support mechanisms because we know that it opens up dialogue that should have been occurring in the first place.
So that's actually one thing that we see that we love is when leaders take their time and the opportunity to share who they are with employees. The second example I will tell you really involves how people talk now about empathy or related words and related concepts as part of their mission, vision, or value statement. One of my favorite phrases related to this is, we create a culture of care.
And when you think about how powerful that is, if I were a person interviewing for a job right now in an organization, if I heard that and saw that and read that and then better yet saw it demonstrated in the actions of the people that I was interviewing with or talking to, I can't tell you how exciting that would be.
And I know for young people in particular here entering the workforce, it's almost a required element for them to believe that they're going to a place that actually cares about them and will continue to care about them in the future. We had a leader during the pandemic who had shared that they were struggling with some mental health stuff and that they were going to counseling. The comments that happened on that call, there were so many employees that felt seen for the very first time.
And it was just it was so heartwarming to see that, you know, it doesn't matter what level you are in the organization that you can show empathy and care and transparency. I think that's so important. Me too. And this idea that just by sharing that leader in that example, by that leader sharing in the example that you gave, that employee felt seen, heard and believed.
And those are important elements in building engagement and authenticity and transparency and and other measures which have an outcome of being empathetic. Yeah. How do HR professionals start to flex the skill themselves? And I mean, inherently, I think we're very empathetic as an industry. And I think a lot of people get into the industry because they care about people. But we can get burnt out real quick. And so how do we continue to fill our cup so we can continue to be empathetic?
You know, Sherm's own research shows that some of the most impacted people through the pandemic and its immediate aftermath were human resources professionals, because not only did the bear the brunt of having to deal with their own personal situations, they were also carrying the water, right, of many of their colleagues, their companies, their organizations, et cetera.
So the care and feeding of HR professionals right now and in the future, I think, has become more and more of an important thing for all leaders at all levels, regardless of the function in which they work to think about. And I also think that HR leaders now have more understanding and more knowledge of the science of emotional intelligence and empathy than they have at any other time in the past. That only serves our profession well.
And it also gives us the capability to continue to think about if we're good at empathy and all things related to it in the building our cultures, what will that deliver for business success? I mean, I can't wait to see the results of some of these longitudinal studies, right, that are being undertaken at the moment.
And I would bet a paycheck on the fact that we're going to see a very positive correlation between empathetic organizations and all stakeholder business results, be that share price or profit or employee satisfaction or community service or whatever else is important to you in that total stakeholder view of the world, because it's not just about shareholder value anymore. I'm going to be super excited to see what all gets better whenever you put time and energy into this effort.
What an exciting way to end our conversation and what a way just to be excited about where HR is going and the impact we can have towards and really bring that empathy to life. So, Jim, thanks for sitting down with me for a few minutes. My pleasure. Thanks again.