"Just as greenwashing exposes the gap between environmental claims and environmental action, kindness washing names the gap between an organisation's kindness rhetoric and its lived reality."— Nicki Macklin, Researcher & Founder, KindFrame
The concept
noun. The practice of an organisation presenting itself as kind — through values statements, wellbeing initiatives, or leadership messaging — while the day-to-day experience of its people tells a very different story.
Like greenwashing — where companies claim environmental credentials they have not earned — kindness washing is the deployment of the language of kindness without the substance. Organisations post about psychological safety, run token wellbeing workshops, and trumpet their compassionate culture, all while their people experience something quite different in the everyday texture of work.
The term was coined by Nicki Macklin, a New Zealand-based researcher and founder of KindFrame who trained as an occupational therapist, whose doctoral work established one of the first rigorous academic definitions of kindness in organisational and healthcare contexts. In naming kindness washing, Macklin gave language to something leaders, employees, and researchers had long observed but struggled to articulate.
Kindness washing is not merely hypocrisy — it is a structural problem. When leaders mistake talking about kindness for enacting it, the result is not neutral. It actively erodes trust, depletes morale, and makes genuine culture change harder to achieve.
The analogy
The parallel is both precise and powerful. Macklin's insight was to apply the same critical lens used in environmental accountability to how organisations treat their people.
A company markets itself as eco-friendly — recyclable packaging, carbon commitments — while its core operations remain unchanged and harmful. The branding is real; the change is not.
An organisation declares kindness a core value — staff wellbeing days, a warm tone in the all-hands — while the systems, leadership behaviours, and daily interactions tell a harsher story.
Warning signs
The evidence
Macklin's doctoral research, conducted through the University of Auckland's School of Population Health, produced one of the most rigorous academic definitions of kindness to date — published in the British Medical Journal Leader. Through systematic analysis of the published literature, she established that kindness is distinct from compassion and empathy: it is action-oriented, positively focused, and purposeful, rooted in civility and the active choice to show respect, generosity, openness, and inclusion.
Crucially, kindness does not depend on how one feels in the moment. It is a set of learnable, repeatable behaviours — which means it can be taught, designed for, and embedded into the systems and structures of an organisation. This is precisely what makes kindness washing so costly: it squanders that potential by substituting performance for practice.
In healthcare, the stakes are starkest. Unkind systems and unkind communication patterns contribute directly to patient harm. But the principle holds across sectors: where kindness is merely decorative, the organisation pays a real price — in trust, in wellbeing, and in results.
The researcher
Nicki Macklin is a researcher, advisor, speaker, and the founder of KindFrame, a New Zealand organisation dedicated to building kinder, higher-performing, trust-driven cultures. Trained as an occupational therapist with a background in quality improvement, she has spent years at the intersection of human experience and organisational life.
Her interest in kindness was not abstract. A personal journey through the healthcare system with an unwell child gave her first-hand experience of the difference between systems that express care and systems that practise it. That gap became the animating question of her career.
She coined the term kindness washing to name a pattern she observed repeatedly across organisations of all kinds: the ritual invocation of kindness as a value, disconnected from any structural or behavioural change. By naming it clearly, she created a new standard of accountability — one grounded in research, not sentiment.
Macklin's work spans healthcare, law, public service, and corporate leadership. She specialises in helping organisations move from aspiration to action: turning values into measurable, embedded practice. Her doctoral research, her advisory work, and KindFrame are all expressions of the same conviction — that kindness is not a luxury or a soft skill. It is foundational to performance, safety, and human dignity at work.
Nicki Macklin works with leaders and organisations who are ready to do the real work — embedding kindness where it counts, and building cultures that are genuinely kinder and genuinely better.