Author(s): Nasser Saad Al Kahtani, Mohammad Rishad Faridi, Ashley Kuchar
Employee engagement in any business environment is of pivotal importance of, towards improving productivity, profitability, and customer loyalty. An organization’s high expectation from its employee to perform efficiently and be highly productive puts tremendous pressure that causes collateral damages like stress, anxiety, and casual approach. Creating a compassionate business environment and cultivate healthy work culture will produce a highly motivated and productive workforce. In this background, the present research aimed to create awareness, build and identify active variables of compassion at the College of Business Administration, Al Kharj, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The college has undertaken such initiative to create a compassionate environment and to shift from competition and competency fatigue to a culture of compassion. The study is based on a primary survey administered among faculty members, students, and administrative staff. It primarily aimed to measure the impact of recently created compassionate environment. The data was evaluated by applying the basic statistical tools. Moreover, an exploratory factor analysis was carried out to evaluate the factors of compassion among the sample observed. Thus observed results indicate a significant compassion practices with a scope and opportunity of elevation to much stronger ethos of compassionate culture. The findings of research could be concluded in threefold (i) compassion is proved to be one of the core factor in increased student involvement (ii) one of the source of motivation among faculty members (iii) cause of morale boosting among administrative staff.
The study will be an impetus to compassion research which would help in combating the repercussions of unprecedented events like COVID 19. Which would help in readiness of humans to be more compassionate and empathetic. This study is a pilot research for other workplaces to initiate collaborate by cultivating compassion.