How do public servants practise empathy?

Empathy has been labelled as a foundational value of public service. At the same time, emotions and empathy are said to be at odds with bureaucratic neutrality and objectivity. An article in the Australian Journal of Public Administration frames empathy as a practice through which care, understanding, and responsiveness are enacted in public service. The article identifies five categories of empathetic practice: helping clients, improving communication, facilitating teamwork, decision-making and program design. Empathy as a practice enables public servants to frame problems, engage with lived experience and challenge dominant assumptions embedded in policy settings.

Empathy entails identifying and understanding other people’s emotions and feeling what the other person feels. Within public administration, empathy lacks a clear definition and has received limited attention. Most studies focus narrowly on street-level bureaucrats, whose frontline roles are conducive to empathetic engagement. There is a lack of understanding in how empathy is applied beyond encounters with frontline staff, such as in policymaking.

Focusing on empathy as a situated practice allows for a more grounded understanding of empathy’s role in public administration. Practice theory is concerned with how social life is constituted through patterns of activity—what people do, how they do it, and how meaning is produced through action. It shifts the analytical focus away from individual traits or institutional structures and instead explores how practices reflect what individuals actually do in specific contexts.

Empathy as practice enables analysis about how public servants define and apply empathy. It captures both their understanding of the concept and how they operationalise it in everyday contexts. This could be through listening, showing care or making policy decisions.

The research was conducted via survey in the NSW public service, with 69 per cent of respondents being female and most aged between 40 and 59. Two open-ended survey questions were included in the survey. The first one was ‘What is empathy?’ and the second one was ‘How do you use empathy in your work?’. The respondents were asked to answer the questions in a free format without any response options.

Around 44 per cent of respondents emphasised emotional connection, compassion and shared feeling, describing empathy as ‘connecting with someone else’s emotions’ or ‘experiencing feelings as a result of care and compassion for someone’. This frame may speak to the prevailing view among public servants that empathy is first and foremost an emotional experience.

Empathy as understanding accounted for 32.4 per cent of responses, focusing on understanding other people’s feelings and circumstances and perspective-taking without feeling what they feel.  For example, this included ‘the ability to understand another’s feelings, even when you do not feel them yourself’ or ‘being able to see in a non-judgemental way and understand another person’s issues’. This is a non-emotional aspect of empathy and is often used interchangeably with perspective-taking.

Finally, around 23 per cent saw empathy as comprising both emotional resonance and reasoned perspective-taking. For example,: ‘The capacity to understand another person’s situation and to put yourself in their shoes emotionally’ or ‘To emotionally understand what other people feel, and/or see things from their perspective and imagine yourself if in their place’.

The research identified five ways in which public servants use empathy. In order of frequency, these are: 

1. To help customers (or clients).

2. To improve communication with customers or colleagues.

3. In interpersonal interactions with colleagues and teams of colleagues.

4. When making decisions and engaging with evidence.

5. In program design or policy advice.

Most of the instances of empathy as practice are purposeful, proactive actions. They are also cognitive and emotional skills and abilities that need to be intentionally mastered to become effective practice.

Empathy is widely used by public servants as an interpersonal resource to improve relationships with both clients and colleagues. In this relational mode, empathy functions as a way of recognising others’ emotions, perspectives, and social contexts. It helps to build trust and reduce friction in service delivery and team environments. In this sense, empathy can be recognised as not simply a personal trait but a relational competence that enables public servants to maintain cooperative relationships.

Empathy is also used by public servants to grapple with structural disadvantage and incorporate lived experience into policy design. This reflects a broader engagement with policy problems where empathy is not just about ‘feeling with’ but about understanding how policy problems are framed. In this sense, empathy becomes a tool allowing public servants to incorporate the stories, voices, and perspectives of marginalised groups in ways that challenge dominant assumptions and reorient policy toward equity and care.