As more offices go back to normal, companies face a choice: Maintain a compassionate workplace or risk losing employees

• Right now, there's no shortage of workers dealing with tough times.
• Organizations that maintain a culture of empathy can see higher engagement and profits.
• Those that don't may struggle with retention and a disengaged workforce.

In late 2021, Alayna Almén, a Midwesterner, found out that her father and his wife had been killed.

She immediately informed her manager, who lightened her workload for a few days. But after Almén notified her manager that the funeral service wouldn't be for a couple of weeks — since authorities had not yet released her father's body — that changed. Almén said her manager gave her all of her work back, plus the backlog that had accumulated. She left that role a few months later.

Almén told Insider companies needed to learn not to treat workers as just "a cog in the wheel" and avoid indicating "that they don't care one way or the other and will just toss you out at their earliest convenience."

Indeed, when global or personal tragedies strike, some workers experience a sense of office dystopia or low-grade anxiety running in the background as the bad news outside feels far away, or almost imaginary, while work continues on. As this fall ushers in a wave of return-to-office mandates amid two ongoing wars, the ways companies help workers get through hard times can have a big impact, both on employees and on the firm.

While the pandemic made empathy and flexibility more common in the workplace, some businesses now face a choice, Katharine Manning, a lawyer and empathy consultant who's written a book on empathy and trauma in the workplace, said.

"Do we pretend we never saw that, that never happened," she said, "or do we use what we learned and try to build a new kind of workplace that will see us through decades and decades to come?"

The stakes are high when it comes to productivity and loyalty, Manning said. Just look at how many employees are already feeling disengaged and quiet quitting.

"The ways that you are supported during hard times makes a big difference in how you feel able to be included and thriving at work," Manning said.

Insider's Molly Lipson reported workers were dealing with an "epidemic of neglect" — in which some say they'd turn down higher pay for a job where they feel valued.

A crash course in empathy

So where to begin? Bosses can start by simply engaging with workers and acknowledging the tough times. A Gallup analysis found that high engagement boosted retention, meaning workers were less likely to look for work elsewhere — and workplaces with higher engagement were more profitable.

"The organizations where they prioritize their people, where they say, I care about you, I want to support you, I'm glad you're here, I'm grateful for you — those kinds of organizations are the beneficiaries of that," Manning said.

Since 2020, many companies have had a crash course in empathy.

The pandemic gave us a "glimpse of what is actually going on in people's lives — because the levels of distress were so high and so widespread," Manning said.

"We were all kind of seeing into each other's homes, so it's really hard to hide the screaming baby in the next room or whatever you were dealing with," she added. "And I do think that a lot of organizations really stepped up in that time."

The real test, now, is whether they can keep that empathy going — especially as there's a renewed push for a return to pre-pandemic norms and workers lose some leverage in the labor market. But even if it's easier to hire, or not acquiesce to workers' demands, that doesn't mean firms should lose that empathy.

To maintain that practice, Manning said, managers need to be trained in having conversations about tough times. Companies should offer workers access to help, such as mental-health resources. Those resources should be accessible — and leaders should model using them. Similarly, firms should ensure that their culture isn't inflicting more damage upon workers and that they're being transparent and applying rules equally to themselves and others.

After all, about a fifth of workers don't have access to sick days, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' regular survey of employers, and there's no federal mandate for bereavement leave, with employers generally offering three days off if a spouse or child dies, a Society for Human Resource Management report found.

"The organizations that don't do that, that want to just pretend, kind of bury their head in the sand and pretend that things are just exactly the way they were before," Manning said. "Those are the ones that are going to suffer. They're going to lose people. And then the reality is people are not willing to work in a place like that anymore."