The Art of Empathy

Imagine if the office was an environment where you were your most creative. Imagine it was a place that celebrated diversity and cultivated empathy to enable strong working relationships, greater creativity, and innovation. Empathy is not a novel concept, but it has gained new importance in our workplace today.

Latest research by Forbes and McKinsey makes it clear that empathy is central to strong leadership, and is an effective way to foster innovation and creativity by generating positive experiences for individuals and allowing working relationships to flourish.

“Companies can celebrate diversity and cultivate empathy by engaging their staff through art.”

As the leading workplace art consultancy we have been tracking the evolution of creative culture in the workplace for the past 20 years and designing bespoke art programmes to grow and support it.

Art requires an emotive interaction from the viewer, meaning that engagement happens at a deeper level, opening oneself up to new perspectives through the narratives within artworks. Art thus can act as a vehicle to evoke empathy, to carve out a greater understanding of ourselves, others, and the bigger picture.

To innovate, we often have to learn from those that we had the least in common, and that comes through empathy.