Empathy

How can you have Empathy?

My wife, Lisa and I have five children. Lisa and our daughter Carly spent this past week in Nashville. That left me and the four boy’s at home. Alone. I mean to fend for ourselves. Seriously to fend.

After I made breakfast, I looked at the clock. I had about 32 minutes until the older 3 kids had to leave for school. I hadn’t cleaned up the kitchen from breakfast yet, I still needed to change the baby, dress him for the day, and make three lunches. I wanted to drink coffee and read the paper too. I figured in my mind that if I could make lunches, clean up the kitchen, and one of the big kids could get the baby’s clothes that I could sit and read and enjoy my coffee for about nine minutes. What I didn’t intend to happen was a melt down from the baby, a 9 year old running into a corner (after getting posted up by his big brother), and a last minute change order to one of the lunches. What was that old commercial? Calgon take me away……..

I am very empathetic towards my wife’s duties running our household. I don’t know if that has always been true. I don’t even think I can appreciate her work until immersing myself in it. How then do we get our employees to have empathy for our customers? It is really tough to immerse our employees into our customer’s world. They just do not have the same work experiences. Or do they?

At KB we made a video that we show during our training classes. It is called “a day in the life of our customer”. Our goal is to show potential employees that our customers have families, struggles, and job responsibilities too. We want to provide that recognition of what role we play as a service provider in our customer’s days. We want to teach them that our customers are just like us and that some days, it will be us that can make or break their day. It isn’t exactly like shadowing or taking over ones duties, but hopefully we can share the emotions and feelings they go through to help us create empathetic employees.

Click below to watch our video.