https://github.com/turingschool/gear-up/blob/master/pre-work/intro_with_empathy.markdown
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What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
Empathy helps me to maintain and develop close relationships with family, friends, and colleges, and influences my broader conscience when related to politics on a personal or bigger-picture level. I gain a lot of love and support from people around me, and generally consider myself to be an extroverted person, so it's very important to build bonds with others and actively mirror the type of support I want for myself. Empathy helps me best cater to specific circumstances and needs of others by helping me feel the nuance of their situation and try to think of what I might want were I in the same situation. Also, I think it's really important to use empathy when dealing with your own life, because we very often have double standards for ourselves that don't hold up to the way we would want to treat others. By having a metric for understanding and compassion, and the moral emotional imperative to do so with others, we can apply that individually towards ourselves or those we interact with personally, as well as bring it into our political decisions that apply to all society. It helps me to act in ways that can enrich my relationships, opens me up to getting close to others I haven't yet gotten to know, and teaches me to think in multi-faceted ways about how to be compassionate and flexible in my reactions to life. It also helps me to check that I'm acting in alignment with my morals.
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How does empathy help you build better software?
Empathy helps build better software because it allows you to understand and anticipate the audience that will interact with it, their needs and possible issues that you can circumvent through better planning or accomodation. As more tech becomes more accessible, there's a wider and more diverse range of people who interact with software in general. If you're marketing or dealing with a specific demographic, being able to put yourself in those shoes can give a real advantage in figuring out the best infrastructure or interface to use that will meet their needs. For example, if you're dealing with an older population, maybe a larger default font is helpful. If you're dealing with kids, you need to have fun graphics or interaction tools to keep them interested. By empathizing, you can find possible new ways to meet your goal based on what's best for the users, or even figure out what won't work and isn't worth wasting time on. Additionally, you open up new markets and avenues for collaboration when you're attuned to the needs of others.
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Why is empathy important for working on a team?
Working on a team inherently requires close interpersonal communication, and optimizing the helpfulness and positivity within that communication is immensely aided by empathy. When people feel slighted, neglected, or misunderstood, it can lead to a morale and therefore productivity decrease. It's also unlikely for someone who feels hurt or dismissed by others to want to help them out, so all parties lose support. Empathy can turn a difficult project into a growth period where people are learning and inspired by each other to do the best they can and work together to accomplish great things. Empathy helps you code-switch, too, so you can match the needs of your team by responding professionally or personally based on the context and what is needed. If someone is going through a hard time, maybe they need a friend. But you also want to be able to take that understanding and translate it to productive collaboration in a professional setting, and empathy helps strike that balance and know when it's appropriate to connect on different levels. Empathy can also aid in developing understanding, patience, and humility toward your coworkers and your own progress. That grace ultimately helps combat burnout and makes work a lot more pleasant and successful.
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Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
I managed the front desk/guest services of a gym for a while, and one of the employees was a young, 18-year-old beefcake. Our team had a lot of tasks that were very straightforward--check people in, fold towels, answer phones. But, we also had to file insurance benefit information for our members to try to get reimbursements, and the bureaucratic mess of insurance companies and the outdated database system we had to keep track of check-ins made it a hard process. As I checked in with my team, I could see that this young coworker was falling far behind on the task and no matter how many reminders he was emailed, he never seemed to complete the task during his shift. Using empathy, I was able to figure out that he was overwhelmed, confident in many tasks so he gravitated toward them when he worked, but seemed unsure of himself with that complex, technical side. He was also afraid of looking incompetent if he either asked for help or clarification, especially as that would mean admitting how far behind he was. I was able to subtly schedule time where I worked alongside him and we did some of the submissions together, so he could see how I did it again and I created a better tutorial for my staff--many of whom might have had the same questions. I also found out he was trying to eventually be a personal trainer, so I shifted his duties to work more on booking and communicating those sessions instead of the data entry tasks, because I know the more interested you are in a job or task, the better you'll perform.
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When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
Being empathetic in a professional setting can be hard when I'm personally overwhelmed, and I'm so focused on trying to do my own tasks that I forget to take a breath and focus in on other people or their needs. It can be really hard to get out of your own head or take time to be patient when you feel rushed or frazzled, and that self-centeredness can be detrimental to being a good part of a team or making connections with coworkers that might help you be less overwhelmed yourself. I think that a good practice of mindfulness and taking a break from my own issues to really be present and be the sort of coworker I would want to have can help improve my skills. Balancing my own emotions and not getting into that hyper-agitated state myself will allow me the emotional space to empathize with others. I think bulding a good rapport is always important because if it is a situation where I'm frantic and someone else is also having a hard time, we both need to have extra patience and time for each other, and having the baseline understanding of respect and support can be invaluable. Taking time to choose to think about others and how they might be feeling or what they're dealing with will ingrain that practice of empathy and make it second-nature, instead of a novel experience, so that integration into my everyday can be a practice that is established before things get hard. I think the best improvment will be building up the empathy muscles, so that in any scenario, I'll be better practiced and attuned.