Sorry does seem to be the hardest word!

I tend to agree with Elton John when he said sorry seems to be the hardest word.

I was in a hotel recently in Bangalore. I was in the shower and waited for a good 10 minutes and there was no hot water. I tried every possible trick, gave up and had a cold water shower and came out. As I was checking out of the hotel, I pointed out to the person in the reception that there was no hot water.

All I expected was just an apology. “Sir, sorry for the inconvenience”.

But he said, “Sir did you call engineering?”

Imagine, If you are in a shower waiting for hot water, would you call engineering?

As I reflect on my recent experiences with any service provider, be it a clinic, a hospital, a retail outlet or a restaurant, I seem to find that frontline employees mostly do not  apologize. As I think about it quite deeply and ask myself what is behind this condition, I come up with a hypothesis.

If apologizing and saying sorry is a sign of empathy, obviously there is a significant deficit of empathy among people who are providing service. One possible explanation for that is, they are not experiencing empathy from others on a daily basis. People around them are so unforgiving of their mistakes that they just don’t feel like apologizing.

Therefore, if we want to create cultures where people are ready to accept their faults and difficulties and inconveniences caused to others, it might be necessary for them to experience a similar level of forgiveness from the people who depend on them for that service.

But today we are in a culture of escalation, of rating and ranting on social media and taking people to task. We are all so unforgiving.

Therefore it is not uncommon to find bouncers in hospitals and Bots on websites. It is almost impossible to talk to a human being on any of the ecommerce or technology enabled service business sites. Every service provider is doing everything they can to protect themselves from all forms of anticipated abuse. That even apples to internal service functions.

I seem to believe that unless the level of empathy in society, in organisations and even in our homes increases, there is neither going to be apologies nor forgiveness.

If you are an Elton John fan, you can listen to the song here: https://lnkd.in/gEzzwvGZ

YouTube: https://youtu.be/0c3OjsDTI3g

Video Link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6effoad7207d22bwtu1dv/Tuesday-Greys-24092024.mp4?rlkey=3z4c5mszj8sxnix3xmu8tsna9&st=xkufuc6a&dl=0