Empathy Without Absorption: Reducing the Weight Adjusters Carry 

The Human Side of Alignment

Article 2 of 8 

At 9:15 a.m., a claims adjuster listens as an injured worker describes another sleepless night. A request for additional treatment is under review, and the worker is frightened about what happens next. The adjuster explains the review process, identifies the next step and offers a specific time for an update. The next call comes from someone whose benefits have been interrupted. The morning's emotional demands remain invisible on the workload report. 

Claims professionals routinely meet people during periods of pain, financial uncertainty and diminished control. Empathy helps them recognize the human experience behind a claim and communicate with care. Yet organizations sometimes ask employees to offer unlimited emotional availability while keeping every other demand unchanged. Adjusters may be expected to absorb anger, resolve concerns beyond their authority and maintain a reassuring tone regardless of the circumstances. Claims leadership has a responsibility to examine what the job requires people to carry. 

Caring vs. Carrying 

Researchers Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki (2014) distinguish empathy from compassion with important implications for emotionally demanding work. Sharing another person's distress can become overwhelming and produce empathic distress. Compassion involves concern for another person's wellbeing and motivation to help. Their research suggests different emotional experiences can emerge from empathic responses. Claims leaders can examine whether employees receive adequate support for responding to suffering without carrying each interaction as a personal burden. 

Emotional labor adds another layer. In a meta-analysis of 95 studies, Ute Hülsheger and Anna Schewe (2011) examined the relationship between regulating emotions at work and employee wellbeing. Surface acting, which involves displaying emotions inconsistent with actual feelings, was associated with poorer wellbeing and less favorable job attitudes. Efforts to change one's internal emotional response showed a different and generally less harmful pattern. Although the studies span multiple industries, their findings challenge the assumption of a pleasant tone being sufficient support for emotionally demanding conversations. 

Demands Hidden in the Job 

Claims-specific research provides additional perspective on emotional labor. Sharon Newnam and colleagues (2016) conducted focus groups with 21 Australian case managers working in personal injury compensation. Participants described emotional control, extra-role commitments and tensions created by competing stakeholder expectations. Their experiences included pressures related to compensation decisions and return to work. Although the small qualitative study cannot establish how common these experiences are among U.S. adjusters, it identifies conditions claims leaders can assess within their own operations. 

An adjuster may be the first person to learn an injured worker cannot afford transportation to a medical appointment. Another may receive repeated calls from someone seeking certainty before a medical review is complete. Both concerns deserve careful attention and appropriate referrals. Problems develop when every concern becomes an individual employee's personal obligation to solve. Professional empathy requires realistic limits and shared responsibility. 

Burnout research reinforces the importance of examining work conditions. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter (2016) identify workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values as areas where job-person mismatches can contribute to burnout. A claims team may receive frequent encouragement to practice self-care while having little authority to resolve recurring obstacles. Employees may be responsible for communicating decisions outside their control. Clearer responsibilities and dependable organizational support may help reduce the resulting strain. 

What Leaders Can Remove 

Start with the expectation of unrestricted availability. An adjuster can provide reliable service through clear response windows, documented next steps and coverage during periods of unavailability. Predictable communication practices create greater clarity for injured workers and allow employees to complete demanding work. Leaders should define when a concern requires immediate escalation and who assumes responsibility after hours. Organizational expectations must consistently support professional boundaries. 

Next, distinguish helpful coordination from responsibility for every crisis surrounding an injury. Financial insecurity, transportation difficulties and family demands may affect a worker's ability to participate in care. Claims professionals can listen carefully, explain available claim-related resources and connect people with appropriate assistance. Supervisors can create referral pathways and clarify which problems require another professional or department. Care becomes more dependable when responsibility is shared among people equipped to provide meaningful assistance. 

Leaders also need to reconsider emotional display expectations. An expectation of constant cheerfulness can make authentic communication harder when an adjuster must deliver unwelcome information. Training can emphasize honest language, accurate explanations and recognition of a worker's frustration. Supervisors can make time to review challenging calls without treating emotional difficulty as a performance failure. Supportive coaching can strengthen attentive communication while preserving professional boundaries. 

Finally, leaders must take ownership of decisions employees are asked to communicate. Adjusters need to understand the rationale for decisions, the scope of their authority and available escalation routes. When a policy creates repeated confusion or distress, supervisors should examine the pattern rather than leave employees to improvise individual explanations. The recommended approach follows broader research on work design and emotional labor, although its effectiveness has not been directly tested as a specific workers' compensation intervention. The leadership question becomes: What pressure can we remove before asking an adjuster to manage it better? 

Workers' compensation depends on professionals who remain attentive when another person is experiencing distress. Empathy supports dignified communication throughout the claims experience. Sustaining compassionate service requires practical decisions about staffing, authority, referrals and organizational support. Every claims organization can examine which emotional demands are essential to the work and which arise from avoidable gaps in its systems. Sustainable compassion begins with the conditions in which people are asked to practice it. 

Research Referenced 

Hülsheger, U. R., & Schewe, A. F. (2011). On the costs and benefits of emotional labor: A meta-analysis of three decades of research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 16(3), 361–389. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022876 

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311 

Newnam, S., Petersen, A., Keleher, H., Collie, A., Vogel, A., & McClure, R. (2016). Stuck in the middle: The emotional labours of case managers in the personal injury compensation system. Work, 55(2), 347–357. https://doi.org/10.3233/WOR-162406 

Singer, T., & Klimecki, O. M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18), R875–R878. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.06.054 

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