14 Moments Where Empathy Made a Tough Work Day a Little More Bearable in 2026

• My boss is such a good person. Whenever an employee is going through something, his first question is “What can we do to help?” He once kept a guy on payroll for months because the guy was seriously injured and couldn’t work. When the guy came back, the repayment plan was $25 a week.
  Most of our employees are from other countries and he’s always willing to help them navigate immigration and court dates. He’ll write reference letters and has even gone to court with them to testify that they were employed with us and to give character references.
  He’s helped employees get driver’s licenses and additional education. He’ll let them use a company computer if they don’t have one. He’s paid for employees to take English as a second language courses.
  A woman in our office has a house and she has difficulty maintaining it. He’s had crews fix her foundation and does clean ups for free. He has done the same for me. The crew power washed and I got a delivery of plants and he didn’t charge me. If we get a huge snow storm, the crew will swing by and plow my drive if my landlord isn’t home.
  Another great person is a coworker. Everyone loves him. I scratched up my car and he took a look at it and did some research and told me exactly what I needed to get. If I had asked him, I guarantee he would have helped me fix it.
  He’s always helping people with car repairs, he knows all the guys really well and they adore him. When they get laid off for the winter and when they come back in the spring, they always find him and give him a huge hug.
  I’m very lucky that I work in a harmonious office where it’s genuinely a group effort. We pitch in and help each other, we all work hard and we treat everyone with respect. I’ve been here 16 years and have no plans of going someplace else.

Bright Side says: Given the current cost of living, it makes us extra appreciative of leadership like this. A team that works under management like this are far less likely to seek a career change. What do you think?

• For 2 years, my coworker declined every after-work invitation. So we stopped asking, assuming she preferred being alone. Last week, she saw my calendar on my laptop. “You guys stopped going out after work?” I said, “We figured you weren’t interested.”
  That’s when she smiled, but not happily. Turns out, she’d never been saying no because she didn’t want to come. She was the primary caregiver for her mom, and every evening she had to be home by six to help with dinner, medication, and getting her settled for the night.
  She said getting invited, even when she couldn’t make it, made her feel like she was still part of the team. When the invitations stopped, she assumed everyone had simply forgotten about her.
  The next week, we moved our monthly team catch-up to a lunchtime picnic in the park instead. She came, laughed harder than I’d ever seen, and stayed until the last minute before heading back to work.
  It made me realize that sometimes inclusion and team-building isn’t about getting everyone to say yes. It’s about making sure people know there’s still a place waiting for them whenever they can.

• In my 30s, I moved about 500 miles away from home. I wasn’t able to see family as much as I would have liked. One of my coworkers was my Work Mom. She was a lovely woman and I didn’t miss my mom as much.

• Unknowingly to me at the time, I passed out at my desk passing a kidney stone. Other coworkers got me water and asked me to relax. One coworker who I rarely interacted with said nope.
  He put me in the company car, drove me to the urgent care near my house (40 mins from work), got my car keys, left me at urgent care after I had been let into a room, got back to work, had another coworker follow him in the company car to my house (had texted for my address), dropped my car off, left my key in my mail slot (connected to the house).
  Family drove me home and I was out of work for a few days. Thankfully it was a one time thing! When I got back to work I had gotten him a thank you cards and gift cards for coffee, but he refused to take them.
  He has a daughter my age and said he was acting like I was his daughter and what he would do in that situation. He retired a few years later, him and his wife bought a big piece of property and he is happily relaxing out there.

Bright Side says: HR should have an employment law on how to act when an employee is severely ill. This reader was lucky they had a company culture that supported them. Would you agree?

• When I was 23, I became great friends with a coworker who was 63. We had great conversations, did great work together and even met up to do some shopping on weekends. She has given me some very helpful motherly advice over the years. I was crushed when she finally retired at the age of 84.

• When I first started subbing, at one of the schools, I met a really great lady. She encouraged me to apply for a full-time position at the school and was just a really great mentor.
  Over the next year, we got to know each other really well. It was so nice to be around a woman who was encouraging to other women. We encourage each other to do our best and have been there for each other through the ups and downs of the job.
  We work in special education. Our population of students is not easy, and the mental toll can be hard if you don’t have support. There have been many days where either her or I just needed to sit and cry, and we don’t push the other to talk until we are ready. Just being there is enough.

• Young guy, different generation than me (a millennial). He is such a hard worker and so chill. Always up to help out, and fun to joke around with too. I didn’t think I’d have much in common with someone from his gen, and it was a pleasant surprise. I’m going to miss him when he moves on this summer.
  My bosses are also amazing. They treat us like real people, and I’ve never felt like I couldn’t go to them with a concern whether it was personal or work related. I still can’t believe my luck.

• My boss had my teammates sing happy birthday to me one year. I had lost both parents and was very lonely and traumatized. That moment was one of the nicest things anyone has done for me.

• I had a coworker who was a super nice lady. She and a couple others of us did things outside of work together periodically. She was also a fabulous baker and loved to cook.
  After her kids moved out she would often bring in what she had made because it was too much for her to eat alone. So any time I hinted that we deserved cookies or cake in the break room, she came through within a couple of days. Yes, I’m a shameless hussy of a munch hound.

• At the start of 2026, my company switched everyone to assigned desks. I ended up next to a guy named Eric who barely spoke. Headphones on all day, ate lunch alone, left exactly at 5. A few people joked that he was “the office ghost.”
  One afternoon I accidentally took his phone charger because ours were identical. I realized when I got home and felt terrible. The next morning I apologized and handed it back. He just smiled and said, “No worries. Thanks for bringing it back.”
  That tiny conversation somehow turned into us chatting for a few minutes every morning. Nothing deep. Weather. Weekend plans. Complaining about the coffee machine.
  A couple of months later I had to give a presentation to senior management. About five minutes before it started, I completely froze. My mind went blank, and I seriously considered pretending I was sick.
  Eric happened to walk past, looked at me, and said, “You’ve practiced this all week. You’re just nervous because you care.” Then he waited with me until it was time to go in. It took maybe two minutes.
  After the presentation I thanked him and joked that he’d somehow become my unofficial therapist. He laughed and said he’d read a lot about psychology after dealing with anxiety himself. One thing he’d learned was that people don’t need a motivational speech—they usually just need someone to interrupt the panic long enough for their brain to catch up.
  It made me realize how much human connection comes from ordinary moments. I still don’t know much about Eric outside of work. But whenever someone says coworkers are “just coworkers,” I think about those two minutes in the hallway.

• My coworker saved me from accidentally using 80 hours of PTO on a trip, he showed me a neat trick that brought it down to 40🥰😁 He also acts like my input is valuable even though I don’t know much about the machines at work.
  Him and I will brainstorm what could possibly be going wrong, and will sometimes come up with the solution. I can’t fix anything because I’m not a technician, but it feels good.😁

• I started a new job six months after being laid off. Everyone seemed friendly enough, but they all had their own groups, and I mostly kept to myself. I’d eat lunch at my desk and leave exactly at 5 because I didn’t know anyone well enough to hang around.
  One Monday I came in looking like I’d barely slept because, honestly, I hadn’t. My dad had been in the hospital all weekend, and I’d spent two nights sleeping in an uncomfortable chair next to him. I wasn’t about to tell my coworkers. I figured everyone had their own problems.
  Around noon I went to heat up the leftover pasta I’d packed. Someone had already cleaned the office kitchen, and I accidentally knocked an entire pot of coffee onto the floor while trying to squeeze past. I just stood there staring at the mess, already imagining everyone thinking, “Great, the new person can’t even make coffee.”
  Before I could grab paper towels, one of the senior managers walked in. I immediately apologized and reached for the mop. Instead, she said, “You look exhausted. I’ve got the floor.” I laughed because I thought she was joking. She wasn’t.
  She started cleaning while another coworker quietly made me a fresh coffee. Someone else handed me their lunch voucher and said, “Go buy yourself something hot instead of eating leftovers.” Nobody made a big speech. Nobody asked for my life story.
  Later that afternoon, one of them stopped by my desk and simply said, “Whatever’s going on, I hope it gets easier.” That was it. It didn’t really give me the work-life balance I needed when I was navigating a tough time but the quiet support without prying, gave me the strength to handle it. My dad’s doing great now, in case you were wondering!

• I was a brand new teacher at a brand new school having a really rough day. I went to the bathroom to cry. One of coworkers who I really didn’t know at all, saw me and waited outside the bathroom until I came out and gave me a hug and asked if I was ok.

• Our manager had one rule: no working from home. “If you’re healthy enough to answer emails, you’re healthy enough to be in the office,” he’d say. One Monday he vanished, but the emails kept coming. HR said, “He’ll be back.”
  Four days later, a colleague spotted him in a hospital waiting room, laptop balanced on his knees. His son had been admitted unexpectedly. He looked exhausted.
  When my colleague asked why he wasn’t just working from home, he gave a tired laugh. “I guess I never realized that not everyone who’s away from the office is away from work.” My colleague told him to close the laptop and then he called us.
  We covered meetings, answered emails, and handled deadlines so he could stay with his son. When he came back two weeks later, the first thing he did was scrap the no-work-from-home rule.
  Sometimes empathy doesn’t come from winning an argument. It comes from living someone else’s reality.

Bright Side says: Working from home has been a debatable topic. Should organizations change their company culture to give this right to every worker?