Elon Musk famously said, “Empathy is not an asset”.
Musk learned this from the video game Polytopia, which he played with his brother, coworkers, and partners. He made a list of life lessons from the game, which he calls Polytopia Life Lessons.
Ruthless Leaders: Outliers or the Norm?
Musk’s indifference to empathy is not isolated when you look at notoriously ruthless business leaders such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. They have all had difficulties with interpersonal dynamics and yet been incredibly successful by the mainstream’s definition of success.
So is this causative or correlative? Is being unempathetic and prioritizing profit over people the reason these leaders have been successful, or is it an unassociated relationship? Well, this is a sample size of 4, so maybe if we looked at a larger sample size, we could definitively determine whether putting people first provides a higher or lower return-on-investment.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: Prioritizing People Pays Off
Let’s take a sample size of 1,636 publicly listed companies and more than 15 million employee wellbeing surveys conducted by Indeed since 2019. This statistically significant dataset is the first of its kind and caught the interest of a team from Oxford University, headed up by Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve. What they did was map the survey responses from people at these 1,636 publicly listed companies and linked those scores to individual firms. They looked at:
1) Return on assets against their wellbeing scores;
2) Annual profitability against their wellbeing scores;
3) Company Valuation against their wellbeing scores.
In this study, De Neve and his team of researchers produced incontrovertible proof that the most successful organizations, and by extension their leaders, prioritize people over profit.
As opposed to the outliers like Musk, Bezos, Gates and the late Steve Jobs, the top 100 companies for wellbeing (they value and prioritize their teams’ wellbeing and engagement), surpassed the S&P 500 by more than 20%.
The study showed conclusively that investments that companies make in workplace wellbeing don’t detract from the bottom line, they contribute to it, even after controlling for company size, industry, geography and other variables.
What If Empathy Was a Strategy?
So back to Elon, Jeff, Bill and the late Jobs. These guys are all incredibly analytical. If they had this revelatory dataset when they were building their companies, how much more successful could they have been if they actually prioritized people over profit?
Breaking the Fear of Fluffiness
This massive body of research on workplace wellbeing makes the truth impossible to ignore. Companies need to get over their “fear of fluffiness” and be prepared to be more empathetic toward their teams’ needs. If they don’t, they will be left behind in the competition for capital. Savvy investors are peering into the future and placing strategic bets on the organizations that prize people over profit.
Measuring What Matters: AFFINITY OS’s Solution
But let’s bring this down to more realistic examples. What about the small to mid sized business owners? At AFFINITY OS™ (AOS), we see this same correlation. All the way from small companies to larger conglomerates, we see that when the team is prioritized, net gain builds, income increases and profits follow.
At AOS, we measure team member engagement and psychosocial risk in real time, gather sentiment and allow our clients to shape workplace wellbeing, simply and effectively.
You don’t need to be Elon Musk and it’s not rocket science. What you measure, you can manage, and measuring team engagement and workplace wellbeing pays huge dividends, as this study unequivocally demonstrated.
The Feel-Good Bottom Line
Placing more emphasis on the engagement and wellbeing of your team will reap significant rewards, and guess what, it feels good, too!
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