Employee Empowerment

More often that not, managers are hesitant to adapt the principle of Employee Empowerment. Instead of viewing it as an act of surrendering your power, you should treat it as a power-sharing approach where employee will take ownership in processes and procedures. It promotes a sense of trust, mutual respect and transparency within the organization.

Being a manager, your role is equivalent of a coach or mentor and therefore, you need to recognize and identify their abilities to act independently.

Getting started - Participatory Management

Understand and embrace the fact the outcome of this process will be Employee Empowerment. Whenever a project or process is carried out, employee skills should be utilized at different levels, in different ways such as skill sharing, brainstorming and active leadership. This will harness their creative capacity and inevitably lead to personal development.

You need to carry out these activities to make it work:

Train and prepare for employee empowerment. Sit down with them and advertise the concept and its advantages. Train them how to contribute in brainstorming sessions and other kinds of participatory interaction.

Provide the opportunities for cross learning among members. Instead of telling each team member what to do, begin the peer learning process by getting those who have already experienced a specific process to share this knowledge with others. As well as seeing that the techniques do work, they will learn the benefits of Employee Empowerment from their peers. It is a potential big time saver and a reinforcement of the concept of Employee Empowerment.

What are the advantages?

Employee Empowerment is a beneficial process for whole company including employees and managers. They feel invested in the company, valued as vital contributors, and are motivated to excel in their respective roles.

Active participants in these workplace will benefit from better skill development, by gaining a better understanding of what type of techniques that work and what do not.

There will be opportunities to provide creative solutions to problems, and new ways to improve performance at various levels. This power to utilize creativity and experience leads to expertise. If they are able to evaluate independently and implement projects , they will gradually gain a sense of ownership which makes them committed to the success of these projects.

Indicators:

Quantifying Employee Empowerment can be difficult due to absence of statistics or percentages by which to measure its success. When it comes to empowerment, the most important measure of success are qualitative measurements. You have to realize that however, that change does not occur overnight.

Indicators of success include:

• Decentralized control: While each team member are maintaining their individual roles, each of them function in relative autonomy, coupled with overlapping roles and functions.
• Team spirit: Every component of the team show a high degree of enthusiasm, which in turn will enhance the morale of the company.This can be considered an important part of team building exercises within the organization
• Open management: Through active involvement in meetings, team members have the opportunity to take part in discussions, evaluations and analysis of important issues collectively to come up with creative solutions. Employees are allowed to exercise control with support from their managers.

By adopting these Employee Empowerment measures, the overall effectiveness of a company will be increased due to a more skilled, motivated and autonomous workforce.