When we empower employees, does that impact their productivity?
Employee empowerment is one of those phrases that often causes people to groan. Is it just another piece of employee lingo or a catch phrase? No, absolutely not. It's an important concept to both reducing employee effort and increasing employee engagement. When employees feel empowered, they are in charge of reducing their own effort and responsible for engaging with the business.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me first define empowerment. According to Google, it means, quite simply: to give (someone) the authority or power to do something.
According to BusinessDictionary.com , it is:
A management practice of sharing information, rewards, and power with employees so that they can take initiative and make decisions to solve problems and improve service and performance.
Empowerment is based on the idea that giving employees skills, resources, authority, opportunity, motivation, as well holding them responsible and accountable for outcomes of their actions, will contribute to their competence and satisfaction.
My own thoughts on it? I wrote previously :
You might be starting to get a glimpse into how and why empowerment and productivity are related.
When employees are empowered, they walk around with a sense of ownership, thinking and acting like they own the business. When you own a business, you put your heart and soul into it, into making it succeed. Empowered employees don't stand on the sidelines waiting to be spoon-fed; they know what to do. They take the horse by the reins and run with the directive (aka the brand promise), being accountable for their roles in the execution of the customer experience and in the success of the business. They work together with others who are just as passionate and who share a common goal. These things combined result in efficiencies from a variety of angles.
An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success. -Stephen Covey
So, benefits of employee empowerment include:
Empowered employees become "better, " more conscientious, employees overall. So it would seem that empowerment is a pretty important thing - to your employees and to the organization. How, then, do we empower our employees?
It seems like there's a lot to do in order to empower employees, but it is important that we reduce any vagueness and that we really set appropriate expectations about what that means. They need to understand your vision and the desired outcomes. And then be allowed to execute.
The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. -Theodore Roosevelt