Employee Empowerment

Employee Empowerment

An environment that fosters growth and involvement of the people, creates the raw material needed to produce greater productivity, process improvement, and innovation. Empowerment means that people are more involved in the design of how they work and in the decisions that affect them. As a result, they feel more ownership in the process and more committed to achieving objectives.

Empowerment means different things to different people. One could define it as: telling people what you want from them, giving them the tools to do it, and leave them alone. However, organizations need to realize that the process depends on the development of the employee’s ability to capably handle the responsibility. It is easy to encourage empowered behaviors from others who feel empowered and accountable in their life already. However, it is difficult to bestow onto someone else an attitude of empowerment if they don’t feel empowered or accountable in the first place.

Employee empowerment is giving employees responsibility and authority to make decisions within the workplace. Good managers are now being called coaches, advisors, or even facilitators. Good “coaches” are expected to help employees improve their job achievements by encouraging, instructing, guiding, and giving them the valuable advice they need to succeed in their work setting. The managers of organizations have the power and capacity to influence the behavior of their employees. Responsibilities must be shared through trust, assurance,

Employee Empowerment

motivation and support. Work-related decisions and full control of the work is being pushed down towards the lowest operating levels of most businesses.

My job does not have to deal with customers directly. However, empowerment of qualified employees will provide exceptional customer service in several competitive markets; therefore it will improve profits through repeated business. Customers prefer to deal...