Employee Empowerment

Employee Empowerment
Definition
Employee empowerment is giving employees a certain degree of autonomy and responsibility for decision-making regarding their specific organizational tasks. It allows decisions to be made at the lower levels of an organization where employees have a unique view of the issues and problems facing the organization at a certain level.
Theoretical Approaches to Empowerment
Three theoretical approaches have been used to study empowerment: socio-structural perspective, psychological approach, and the critical perspective. The socio-structural perspective focuses its attention on developing or redesigning organizational polices, practices, and structures to give employees power, authority, and influence over their work. The psychological approach focuses on enhancing and enabling personal effectiveness by helping employees develop their sense of meaning, competency, self-determination, and impact. The critical perspective challenges the notion of employee empowerment and argues that efforts to create empowerment may actually lead to more, albeit less-obvious, controls over employees.
Advantages to Employee Empowerment
Employee empowerment provides some distinct advantages. Employee empowerment should lead to increased organizational responsiveness to issues and problems. Another advantage of employee empowerment should be an increase in productivity. It should also lead to a greater degree of employee commitment to organizational goals since employees can take some degree of ownership in the decisions made toward goal achievement.
Disadvantages to Employee Empowerment
Employee empowerment is not without some disadvantages. It can lead to decreased efficiency because decisions may not be uniform and optimized for organizational goals. It can also create problems with coordination throughout the organization because decisions are decentralized and not managed at the top. Manager and employee relationships can become tense as the boundaries of authority can be blurred. Finally, according to the critical perspective, attempts at employee empowerment can be counterproductive, actually creating greater controls over employees. For example, empowering employees through the use of teams may create peer pressure.
1. Top management is committed to supporting an employee empowered culture.  This includes developing an organizational definition of empowerment that may include well defined boundaries and management training on how to coachempowered employees.
2. Employee empowerment is centered on the needs of the customer.  When employees are empowered to make decisions that help the customer, they are contributing to the strategy and business objectives of the organization.
3, Management hands over a level of the decision making power to front line employees.  This act of delegation may be something as simple as allowing an employee to make service recovery decisions.
4. Employees are trained to take on these new customer focused responsibilities. Training may include customer service, problem 
5. Empowered employees are given access to information and data that can be used in their decision making process.  This information might include feedback from customer satisfaction surveys or customer comment cards that can help make informed customer-focused decisions.
6. Managers have trust and confidence in employees to make the right decision.  A manager that second-guesses an employee’s decisions can impact an employee’s confidence in their decision making ability.
7. Authority and decision making responsibility comes with specific expectations and boundaries.  For example, an employee may be empowered to correct a situation for a customer up to a certain dollar amount.
8. Employees are provided mentors.  Mentors should be someone who has successfully done something that the employee is learning to do.  For example, if an employee is learning to be empowered to perform service recovery, their mentor should be someone who has learned the critical thinking skills to assess different situations and come to reasonable conclusions.
9. As employees develop their skills, they are provided positive reinforcement and coaching as they maneuver different decision making scenarios.  We all make mistakes when we first begin making decisions so it is important to provide good coaching and positive reinforcement.
10. Compensation and performance expectations are aligned around customer needs.  This reinforces an employee’s motivation to make the right decisions.
11. Assess social styles to match employee competencies with job responsibilities. Using an effective assessment tool like DISC or Myers Briggs can help identify employee strengths.
12. Employees are provided the appropriate tools and equipment to do their job.   Some employees are very vocal about their needs but others will work with aging equipment and never speak up.  Assessing changing technology and equipment should be part of anorganization’s strategy for empowered employees.
13. Have a plan to  implement an empowerment environment. Implementation should be mapped out and a timeline for all aspects should be written so all understand the timing and process of implementation.Lastly, organizations with strong empowerment models show that productivity and customer satisfaction improves within an empowered culture.
 




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