Jon Foster-Pedley is dean and director of Henley Business School Africa.

There is an unparalleled need now to be empathetic, even more so than when we were heading into lockdown, as we are entering both an economic and psychological recovery phase. But we need 'Big E' institutional empathy, not just 'small e' individual empathy.

How empathetic should managers be to the needs of their staff? Do we even know what we mean when we speak of empathy? Is there a difference between what employers consider empathy to be and what employees expect?

A fierce debate around the concept of caring might seem a strange hill to die on, but it is fast becoming a very contentious issue in the global workplace. Covid-19 disrupted our lives in ways that none of us could have foreseen; the tectonic shift of lockdown led to a series of aftershocks that are reverberating to this day, even after the two-year-long national state of disaster was lifted.

During the transition to working remotely, initially entirely working from home, many companies thought about the potential impact on the mental wellbeing of their staff. Some signed up life coaches and mentors, others appointed fully fledged psychologists. Human resources...