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"Infotech executives are starting to talk funny, and we all need to pay attention. \u201CDesigning emotion into the product is now something you really have to think about explicitly and measure yourself against,\u201D says Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, the maker of personal finance and small-business software. He\u2019s telling me what it takes to win in his business today. When he and his colleagues test software, they mark it up with \u201Chappy faces or puzzled faces so the developers understand the emotion we were feeling at the time.\u201D Really? For software that keeps the books?\n\u201CI need great product designers, and IT people aren\u2019t always great at aesthetics,\u201D says the CIO of one of Europe\u2019s largest retailers at a conference in Berlin recently, describing his hiring challenges. \u201CAnd I need people who are empathetic and collaborative. I can\u2019t have a great IT architect who has to be locked in a room.\u201D Excuse me? Isn\u2019t that where code writers are most at home: alone in a dimly lit room, a crumpled bag of chips at their side?\n\u201CWe\u2019re hiring artists, special-effects creators, and people who understand beauty,\u201D says Charles Phillips, CEO of Infor, a maker of enterprise software. We\u2019re at his headquarters in Manhattan\u2019s Silicon Alley, where he\u2019s describing his strategy for competing against industry giants Oracle and SAP. Infor, he says, offers \u201Cbeautiful business software for your business processes.\u201D This, for software that has long occupied the boiler room of corporate infotech.\nThe clear trend here is not some fad in the software industry. A mushrooming demand for employees with affective, non-logical abilities spans the economy. Empathy\u2014sensing at a deep level the feelings and thoughts of others\u2014is the foundation. \u201CNon-cognitive skills and attributes such as team working, emotional maturity, empathy, and other interpersonal skills are as important as proficiency in English and mathematics,\u201D reports an advisory group of executives and educators on education reform in the U.K. When author George Anders searched for online job postings that paid over $100,000 a year and specified empathy or empathic traits, he quickly found 1,000 of them from companies as varied as Barclays Capital, McKinsey, and Mars.\nNOT FEELING YOUR PAIN College students today display far less empathy than those of a generation ago\u2014but it&amp;#8217;s a quality employers increasingly want and need.Graphic Source: Personality and Social Psychology Review\nIt\u2019s happening for several reasons. Partly it\u2019s a search for differentiation in a world where many products and services are becoming commoditized. From computers to refrigerators to websites, they mostly work fine and are reliable enough. How will yours distinguish itself? Intuit\u2019s Smith knows the question to ask: \u201CDid it leave me with a positive emotion?\u201D\nMore and more, CEOs are concluding that to compete and win, they first need to understand the customer\u2019s inner experience. Their employees need empathy. And that trait is becoming ever more valuable, in part because the supply of candidates who possess it seems to be shrinking\u2014at least in the U.S. Empathy among American college students has declined significantly over the past 30 years, say researchers from the University of Michigan and University of Rochester Medical Center (see chart above). Other research gives little reason to believe it will increase as they grow older.\nAnd that brings us to a deeper issue. We have evolved exquisitely to connect in person. Consider what happens when you\u2019re near someone and his or her face displays an emotion fleetingly, through a so-called micro-expression. Your own face mimics that expression within milliseconds, and the other person, in turn, detects your response. You have empathized without either one of you being aware of it\u2014but it doesn\u2019t happen if you\u2019re alone in your cube. Which, virtually speaking or not, is where many of us spend our time these days. As work becomes dominated by technology, our individual worlds become increasingly cognitive and virtual, lacking in face-to-face contact.\nThat may be why IT companies are at the vanguard of this new movement in corporate management: Getting ahead in tech today requires, among other skills, seeing the world from outside the cube. Empathy, emotion, and beauty aren\u2019t as easy to measure as other metrics of employee performance. But to use another affect-laden term, it\u2019s time to embrace them.\nThis story is from the September 22, 2014 issue of Fortune."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/employers-new-hires-empathy/>