11 Coworkers and Bosses Who Saw Someone Struggling at Work and Answered With Empathy, Not Judgment

On September 19, my coworker Dana came back from lunch at Harlan Medical Billing with a black Coach bag on her arm. I had lent her $800 for rent in March, and she’d promised to pay me back by May. May passed, then summer, and she never mentioned the money.
When I asked about it in front of the whole floor, she shrugged. “You never asked for it back.” Then she walked away.
That night she tagged me in our work chat and wrote that I’d told her there was no rush. I hadn’t. I’d texted her twice, in June and July. I muted the thread and took a PTO day. The next morning I found an email from Dana in my inbox. She said the bag was her mother’s. I assumed it was one more excuse.
Three days later, an envelope was on my keyboard. Inside were eight $100 bills and a note: “I’m sorry. I should have answered in July.” I felt awful and found her in the stairwell to give her my own apology. She told me everything in order.
In March, her mother’s apartment in Dayton had to be emptied, and Dana took five unpaid days to do it. Rent was due while she was away, so she borrowed my money and sent it to her landlord. The drive, a storage unit, and a $310 cleaning fee ate everything she’d set aside to repay me.
In September, her aunt mailed a box of her mother’s things, and the bag was inside. It arrived on the 19th, and Dana picked it up at the post office on her lunch break and carried it upstairs so it wouldn’t sit in a hot car.
When I’d asked about the money in front of everyone, the shrug was all she could manage, and the lie in the chat was panic. The morning after that chat, Mr. Reyes, who was a member of the same group chat, had read the whole thread and called her in. Within an hour he approved an $800 payroll advance, $200 per paycheck for four paychecks, with one instruction: pay me first.
The cash in my envelope came from that advance. He showed empathy to someone he had every reason to write up. Hearing it, I had more empathy for her than I had all week. Dana asked for my forgiveness, and I gave it on the spot. Trust took longer, but it came back.

I made a mistake that cost the company a nice chunk of money. He took part of the blame because as my boss he should have put steps in place to prevent it from happening and helped me set up a process to avoid it happening again.

I’m an only child, single, no children, and have no extended family left. I’ve been reclusive most of my life so only have a couple of friends who I don’t see often, though we talk and text a lot.
Anyway, after my mother passed in 2003, I went back to work and everything seemed normal, but of course I was grieving privately.
One day I was in the ladies’ public restroom washing my hands at the sink, and an older coworker who worked in another part of my office walked in. She took one look at me, came up to me, and embraced me in a motherly way. She said nothing, but she didn’t have to. I hugged her back and thanked her.
She then went on with her business, and I finished washing my hands. I can’t express how comforting that hug was, and I’ve never forgotten it. Btw, this lady passed away not long afterward.

Payday at our dental office in Mesa, Arizona, came and went, and Tamika, who works the front desk with me, acted as if nothing was owed. In February she’d asked to borrow $350 until payday. Her alternator had failed, and without a car she couldn’t get from Chandler to the 6:30 shift.
I’d never lent money at work, but I sent it through Venmo that night. I said nothing at first. By April I was irritated, mostly because my car registration was $212 and due May 1. Our workplace is small, and a couple of months of avoiding each other felt much longer.
On April 22, I finally asked her in the parking lot, with the engine of my car still running. She looked at the ground and said she’d had the money every month, but every month it went to her mom in Tucson, whose rent had gone up $175 after the landlord sold the building.
Tamika had been covering it with half of her check since January. She hadn’t told me because she’d just borrowed from me and felt like a liar. She paid me $100 in cash right there. I had no idea what to say, so I said okay, and I forgave the delay before she finished her sentence.
In May, Tamika started picking up Saturday shifts. When I asked why, she told me she’d explained everything to our office manager, Mrs. Doyle, who put her on two Saturdays a month. Tamika paid me $50 a week after that.
On June 3, she put the last $50 on my desk with a thank-you note. I had my registration done by then. Her family budget was still tight, but she had stopped dodging me in the break room, and I started to trust her with the schedule again.

At Brandt Dental Supply in Omaha, 14 of us raised $1,140 for Rosa, our cleaner, after she told Gary at the front desk that her husband had lost his warehouse job. Gary started the envelope, and I gave $200. At the end of the day we handed it to her, and she cried.
The next morning I came in at 7:40, early for my daughter Ada’s appointment. Through the glass wall of the office, I saw Rosa, shaking, hand the same envelope to Nora, our boss. Nora slipped it into her blazer and said quietly, “Not a word to anyone.”
At the 9 o’clock meeting, I asked about it in front of everyone. Nobody moved. Then Nora put her pen down and burst into tears. “It was never for Rosa,” she said. “It was for Ada.”
Weeks earlier, I had asked Nora to move my Monday shifts around and explained why: our insurer had denied a claim, and we were left with a $4,400 balance on Ada’s bill. She offered me a company advance twice, and twice I said my family had it covered.
She suggested the hardship fund, but it meant paperwork, and I refused that too. I didn’t want my coworkers to see me as the one who needed help. “You’ve given to every collection this office ever had,” Nora told the room. “You never took a dime back. So I needed one that wasn’t about you.”
Rosa’s husband never lost his job. Nora had asked her to tell Gary that story, because it was the only kind of collection I would give to without asking questions. Rosa agreed because Nora had once driven her to the airport at 4 a.m. when her mother fell ill.
The hospital’s billing office had given us until the end of the month, so Nora added $3,260 of her own to the $1,140. She had planned to explain everything at Friday’s meeting, once the bill was paid. I just asked on Tuesday. “And my $200?” I asked. “The first bill I counted,” she said.
Two years ago, Nora had been out of the office for weeks with a personal matter, and when she came back, everyone lowered their voices around her. She hated that more than anything, and she figured I’d hate a gift with my name on it just as much.
When the room understood, nobody asked for their money back. Gary said he would have given more if Nora had trusted him with the truth, and Rosa said she’d tell the story again tomorrow. I forgave them both for the secrecy before I’d finished crying.
A few days later, the hospital sent a statement with a balance of $0.00. I keep it in my wallet behind Ada’s appointment cards. Trust at our workplace runs deeper now, and I still don’t know what to say to Nora.

At a retail job in my early 20s, a customer was (albeit mildly) rude to me but it really hit me emotionally, so I went to the back and burst into tears. A really kind-hearted manager noticed me crying, and after hearing what happened, he gave me a hug and told me to never change because my sensitivity is part of what makes me special and makes me good at what I do.
He probably has no idea, but his words really touched my heart as I had always been pretty sensitive and had never been so gracefully received for who I was, as I was. Years later and his words still come back to comfort me, especially in times where I feel alone and misunderstood in my emotions. I’ll never forget him and I hope to meet another boss like him one day.

I live in the Midwest, and the snowstorm last winter was terrible. So my car battery completely went out. I was taking an Uber to and from work for a couple of days.
When my coworker found out, she offered to take me home so I wouldn’t have to take an Uber. Then she told her husband about my car situation, and he came to my house to replace my car battery in the cold.
He didn’t let me pay him, but I did pay him for the new battery. This was my first time meeting him! They are such a lovely couple.

My company was reorganizing teams, and I was asked to train a new hire who was clearly brought in to take over my role. I didn’t fight it. I just wanted to collect my severance and leave. On my last Friday, I packed up my desk and used my last half-day of PTO to head out early.
While I was still gathering my things, the new coworker walked past, dropped a crumpled paper into the recycling bin beside my desk, and whispered, “Don’t sign the digital exit paperwork.” I was confused but trusted her tone.
I found out later how she knew: HR had handed her the same contract template that morning, and she’d read it closely. At home, I looked at the PDF myself. The company had slipped in a two-year non-compete clause that would have kept me out of my industry.
I didn’t sign. I emailed HR and asked them to remove it, and they sent a corrected version the next day. I signed that one and got my check.
She didn’t owe me a thing, and we weren’t friends. In a workplace where she’d only just started, speaking up took nerve. Giving me a quiet heads-up so I could keep working in my field was a highly pragmatic, unexpected act of kindness.

I completely messed up the dates for my best friend’s out-of-state wedding and ran out of vacation time. I asked my boss for an unpaid Friday off, mentioning the town where the wedding would be held, but he just pointed at the rigid workplace handbook. “No unapproved absences,” he said, not even looking away from his screen. I was practically ready to quit my job right there.
On Thursday afternoon, he dropped a heavy box of old promotional flyers on my desk. He handed me the keys to the company van and said, “I need these delivered to the new branch. It’s a six-hour drive each way. Don’t come back to the office until Monday.”
The new branch was twenty minutes from the wedding venue, and he knew it because I’d mentioned the town when I asked for the day off. There was no lecture, no deep emotional conversation, and no hugs.
He never brought up my mistake again, and I understood that I’d been forgiven. He just handed me a fake corporate errand so I wouldn’t be flagged by HR. In a strict corporate workplace, an authorized road trip is an incredibly effective form of kindness.