When empathy is at the core of your business and brand, it builds great teams

But looking back now, five years later, I can honestly say it was one of those “worst and best things” that ever happened to us. Because in stripping away everything we thought we knew about running our business, it forced us to discover what truly mattered, and that was empathy.

What we’ve learned might surprise you, because it certainly surprised us.

The empathy epiphany: What happens when you stop managing tasks and start enabling people

Before Covid, we were good at what we did. We delivered projects on time, clients were happy, and we ticked the boxes that successful agencies are supposed to tick. But we were operating more like a well-oiled machine than a team of humans working with other humans.

The restructure that followed our Covid wake-up call changed everything. We stripped away layers of hierarchy, created a consciously small senior team, and discovered something we hadn’t expected: when you lead with empathy, everything else follows.

Here’s what that actually looked like for us:

We started really listening to what our clients weren’t saying. Take our work with a major global brand. Their internal contact was clearly frustrated, caught between our requirements and central decisions they had absolutely no control over. When launch times changed multiple times (including one memorable 4am launch) because our team understood and felt for their challenges, we were all happier to muck in to get the job done. 

And we realised something that seems obvious now: clients don’t always have full autonomy in their organisations. Once we understood that, everything changed. We became more flexible, more supportive and, weirdly, we got better results.

This shift started affecting how we worked internally, too. When someone on our team seemed to be struggling with deadlines, instead of just pushing harder, we started asking: what’s actually blocking you here? More often than not, there were obstacles we could remove or support we could provide that made all the difference.

We also discovered that different people need completely different approaches. Some team members thrive with daily check-ins, others do their best work when left alone for weeks. Some need everything documented, others prefer a quick conversation. We’d always known this intellectually, but we’d never actually adapted our management approach accordingly.

The breakthrough came when we stopped trying to make everyone fit our processes and started adapting our processes to help people succeed. It was more work for us initially, but the results spoke for themselves.

How this empathy shift transformed our client work

This internal change inevitably influenced how we approached our client projects, too. Our Strategy & Creative Director, Harry, summed this up nicely:

“One change we’ve made for the better in our brand projects is to use empathy as a central tool. It allows us to help our clients see the world from their customer’s point of view. So our workshops now revolve primarily around who the business is serving, how these people show up in the world, what’s at stake if their interactions with a brand aren’t successful, and what the positive outcome really is.

That empathic response is often felt in the workshops we run, clients experiencing their customers’ perspective for the first time, or learning more about their customer’s journey through life and the role they play in that story. It helps to realise that what a business offers and what a customer is looking for are often misaligned. Using empathy as a tool for alignment can be a game changer.”

This approach extends beyond our client relationships to the end users of everything we create. When we’re designing a website or digital product, we’re constantly asking: what’s the person on the other side of the screen actually trying to achieve? What’s their emotional state when using this product? What might be frustrating them? What would make their day easier? We’ve found that the most effective digital experiences happen when you can anticipate user needs rather than just respond to them.

It’s the difference between creating something that works technically and creating something that feels genuinely helpful. Whether it’s designing a website for a business providing alternative education, where we had to consider not just the young people who might be researching options, but also concerned parents, referring professionals, and the educators themselves, each with completely different needs and anxieties, empathy for the end user transforms how we approach every design decision.

Learning to learn with people, not for them

The biggest shift over the past five years has been moving from thinking we know what people need, to genuinely believing that our team members know what they need to do their best work.

This sounds simple, but it wasn’t. We had to unlearn a lot of assumptions about what “good management” looked like.

What this meant in practice:

We started having different kinds of conversations. Instead of “here’s what you need to do” meetings, we found ourselves in “what do you need from me” conversations. Instead of monitoring whether people were following our processes, we started asking whether our processes were actually helping people get good work done.

We discovered that when we trusted people to know their own working styles and needs, they stepped up in ways we hadn’t expected. Give someone the communication style they work best with, and suddenly they’re more engaged. Remove obstacles they’ve been working around, and their productivity jumps.

The shift from service provider to strategic partner

And it’s great to see that our clients see it too. In our latest satisfaction survey, I was thrilled to read a comment from a client: “Not only were our goals understood, but solutions we had not considered were presented.” That’s the moment you know you’ve moved beyond just doing what you’re asked.

We made some specific changes to how we approached new projects. We started having much more thorough discovery phases, not just to understand what clients wanted, but to really dig into why they wanted it and what they were trying to achieve for their business. We learned to structure our process differently depending on the client – some needed multiple stakeholders brought on a journey, others had small decisive leadership teams. Some needed our full in-depth approach, others worked better with streamlined versions.

The feedback from clients has been telling. One mentioned: “Communication has always been very clear, and expectations always set early.” Another noted: “From what I could see, the part of the Salad team that I worked with, worked well together. It felt to me, like Salad were a strong team.”

What we discovered was that when we stopped trying to fit every client into the same process and started adapting our approach to what each client actually needed, the quality of outcomes improved dramatically. But more than that, clients started seeing us differently, not as the people they hired to execute their ideas, but as partners who could help them think through challenges they hadn’t even identified yet.

What we learned about creating psychological safety

Here’s where things got really interesting: when problems started happening. Because in any business, things go wrong. The question we hadn’t considered before was: do people feel safe telling you about problems when they’re still small and fixable?

We discovered some surprising things:

In one website project, we realised that clients sometimes don’t understand our processes, things like wireframes or user acceptance testing. But we found that when we slowed down and did a bit of gentle education, the whole project went more smoothly. More importantly, the client felt supported rather than confused.

We started seeing the same pattern internally. When someone didn’t understand something or needed help, we stopped treating it as a performance issue and started treating it as useful information about our training and support systems.

The really interesting discovery was around how we handled conflicts and competing priorities. We’ve moved to establishing frameworks upfront, so if there’s tension between SEO requirements and visual design, everyone knows which takes priority before we start. It may sound bureaucratic, but it actually creates more freedom because everyone knows the reasons behind decisions.

What changed in our day-to-day work:

We introduced something we call “wash-ups”, honest team discussions after projects finish, focused on what we could learn rather than who did what wrong. The shift from blame to curiosity was huge.

We made it explicitly okay to raise problems early. In fact, we started thanking people for bringing up concerns quickly, because we realised that early problems are usually easy to fix while late problems become crises.

We noticed that when people felt safe to ask questions and admit when they didn’t know something, the quality of work went up across the board. Turns out, pretending you understand something you don’t is a major source of project issues.

How we know this is actually working? The results spoke louder than we expected

We just completed our annual client satisfaction survey, and honestly, the results surprised us. 97.5% overall client satisfaction. 97.5% would recommend us. 87.5% rated working with our team as 5 out of 5 for being enjoyable to work with.

But the numbers, while gratifying, weren’t what struck us most. It was the specific feedback that showed us how much our approach had really changed.

On understanding their business: “Not only were our goals understood, but solutions we had not considered were presented.” Another said: “We imposed a relatively short timeline on Salad… Every deadline and milestone was met.”

About working with us as a team: “From what I could see, the part of the Salad team that I worked with, worked well together. It felt to me, like Salad were a strong team.”

The most telling feedback came around the impact we’re having on their businesses: “Having the data from resource downloads has been invaluable in measuring performance of certain campaigns/providing warm leads for sales.” Clients are seeing measurable results – consistent leads through improved website search ranking, enhanced user experience, higher website views and clicks, cost-effective solutions that meet their budgets all from a small tweak to our business ethos.

What surprised us most in their feedback? The areas they wanted us to focus on going forward. Clients asked for more proactivity: “Proactivity is the only thing”, and “Would be nice to see more ideas.” They wanted more connection: “It would be great to have more opportunity to meet up with the team”, and “I’d be interested in a monthly newsletter from Salad with website considerations, case studies and examples of work.”

What struck me was that these weren’t complaints about what we were doing wrong – they were requests for more of what we were doing right. More strategic thinking, more partnership, more connection. That told us we were on the right track, but there was room to go even further in the direction we’d been heading.

One client summed it up perfectly: “Communication has always been very clear, and expectations always set early.” That’s empathy in action: anticipating what people need and providing it before they have to ask for it.

What we’d do differently if we started over

When we reviewed our team structure a year after our Covid restructure, there was overwhelming agreement that our new approach worked beautifully. Five years later, we’ve had just two people leave the team, and over 70% have been with us for six years or more. One of our recent recruits was actually someone who returned to us, having worked with Salad between 2017 and 2019. That feels like the ultimate endorsement.

But the real difference isn’t in the numbers, it’s in how work feels day to day. More collaborative, more human, more effective.

If we were advising someone starting a team from scratch now, here’s what we’d recommend they focus on from day one:

Spend more time in the beginning understanding how each person works best rather than trying to fit everyone into the same mould. Not because you’re trying to be nice, but because quite simply the results are better when people can work in ways that suit them.

Build flexibility into your processes from the start rather than trying to retrofit it later. Having frameworks that can adapt is much more powerful than having rigid systems that break when circumstances change.

Create space for early problem-raising right from the beginning. The cultural norm of “raise issues quickly and we’ll solve them together” prevents so many bigger problems down the line.

Be intentional about collaborative problem-solving. When conflicts or bottlenecks arise, having established patterns for working through them together makes everything smoother.

The things that surprised us most:

How the energy shifted when we encouraged an approach that was designed to work with people’s strengths and weaknesses. When people are supported, energy goes into solving problems and improving work instead.

How much more honest communication you get when you respond to concerns with curiosity and a supportive mindset rather than judgment. People tell you about small issues before they become big ones.

How much better the work becomes when you design processes around helping people succeed rather than making management easier.

How much people step up when they feel genuinely trusted and supported rather than monitored and directed.

The path from those devastating phone calls in March 2020 to where we are today wasn’t one I would have chosen. But sometimes the hard stuff really is preparing you for something better. And sometimes, when you strip everything back to what matters, you discover that what matters most is simply caring about the people you work with, and the people they’re trying to serve.

Looking back, empathy wasn’t something we chose as a business strategy. It was something we discovered worked better than anything else we’d tried. The competitive advantage came as a byproduct of just trying to create a place that looked after our people, our clients and in turn their clients or customers. 

I’m curious about your experience: have you noticed that the teams and workplaces that lead with empathy are also the ones that perform best? What’s made the difference in the best team environments you’ve been part of?