In the current business scenario, if employees are asked whether they like to be empowered to do their jobs, more often than not they will answer yes. Why does empowerment count to them? It’s because empowerment is the process of enabling an individual to think, take action, control work and make decisions in independent ways. It brings the feeling of fulfillment as they can do what they think is right and also be responsible for their final performance results.
The secret behind a successful empowerment which makes people productive and happy relies on some simple practices. Trust your employees to do the right thing and make the right decision. Give your employees power to do their job. These are some of the actions that enable people to soar. Empowerment also means more challenges for your employees, filtering the “can-do” attitude to inspire them to perform even better. Conversely, where empowerment is feeble, employees feel they are not potential or capable to fulfill challenging tasks. This will definitely lead to boredom and lack of enthusiasm to perform their task efficiently.
Empowerment is accompanied with some basic practices below.
Share leadership vision
Make people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves and their individual job. Hence, you need to help your staff understand well the organization's overall mission, vision, and strategic plans. Share the most important goals and direction to help them easily achieve the target.
Provide sufficient information for decision making
Make sure that your workforce has access to all necessary information and tools to make thoughtful decisions to solve the assigned tasks successfully. So if you want an employee to settle a problem with an unsatisfied customer, you should provide him/her all information regarding this customer such as his behavior, habits and some major reasons why he is not satisfied with your service.
Make empowerment different from a normal task assignment
What makes empowerment different from task assignment is you provide guidance by asking questions, not by telling experienced people what to do. When an employee brings you a problem to solve, ask, "What do you think you should do to solve this problem?" or "What action steps do you recommend?" By this way, employees can demonstrate what they know and grow in the process.
In the next article, we wil share with you how to involve your employees to generate effective empowerment results.
