Introduction
Employee empowerment has been defined in many ways but generally means the process of allowing employees to have full input and control over their work, and the ability to openly share suggestions and ideas about their work in the organization as a whole.
In other word empowering the employee means enabling a worker to achieve his or her highest potential. For most medium and large companies, this might be new and maybe the most powerful and useful concept in total quality management (TQM). Empowerment requires turning the organization chart upside down
, recognizing that management is in place to aid the worker in overcoming problems they encounter, not to place new roadblocks in their way.
Some strategies that need to be considered carefully by management during empowering the worker in an organizational system:
- Take full ownership – allowing the workers or employees in an organization to take the ownership of their work with full managerial portfolios or responsibilities.
- Value all contributions – that is important to enhance the self-esteem of the contributor and to accept their contribution and evaluate it.
- Listen to the least voice of the workers – it is important to listen to the least voice of the workers during decision making and other processes as well.
- Everyone has value – every workers or employee in an organization system has a value that they want to add to the success of the business, these value should be treated equally without discrimination.
- Teams must own the problems – team under this category must be allowed autonomy. If there is distrust by the management towards the team, these may lead to fear rules and will spiral to lower productivity.
- Given quality awards to a customer who has improved their business – this might be a tactical strategy of motivating the workers or employees reward which might make them be more committed to their stewardship.
- Delegate authority to the right organizational level – authority need to be delegated to the right organizational level in order to achieve efficiency and effectiveness of management goals and objectives.
Some few clues which empowerment strategies provide to an organizational system:
- It provides an employee with the opportunity to define and document processes.
- It provides the employee with the opportunity to learn about processes through training and development.
- It provides the employee with the opportunity to improve and innovate best-practice methods that makeup processes.
- It provides the employee with the latitude to use his or her own value judgement to make decisions within the context of best practice methods.
- It provides the Employee empowerment of trust in superiors won’t react negatively to the latitude taken by people making decisions within the context of best practice methods.
Thank you
You can see more Employee empowerment management training, business, and marketing materials HERE.
