7 in 10 employees rank empowerment as an essential engagement element – HuffPost
The above statistics hold true as employee empowerment is a critical aspect that can enhance workforce engagement, productivity, and performance. Companies can empower their employees by setting clear expectations and goals, trusting their abilities, giving them the freedom to perform their tasks, supporting their ideas, etc.
This will improve employees’ job satisfaction, motivate them to explore challenging tasks, and helps maximize their efforts in delivering better results. It, in turn, will lower turnover rates significantly and contribute to the organization’s success.
This article highlights the significance of employee empowerment in today’s workplace and how Saviom can empower the workforce.
Before that, let’s understand employee empowerment and its various types.
2) Employee empowerment: Definition & Types
Employee empowerment is a management strategy where the workforce is given a certain degree of autonomy and control to manage their tasks and make decisions without supervision. For instance, an organization where employees can voice their suggestions to improve the processes or are given the independence to create and manage new systems is considered an empowered workplace.
Employee empowerment can be of various types:
- Decision-making empowerment
Decision-making empowerment happens when organizations give employees the freedom to make decisions on simple or complex issues. This will increase employees’ interest in contributing to the business’s success.
- Financial empowerment
Financial empowerment is the process of allowing employees to decide the use of the funds and budget for supporting their roles and achieving company goals. It enables them to utilize their budgets consciously and avoid additional expenses.
- Self-empowerment
Self-empowerment is when employees are given the power to complete their tasks independently. This will make them feel responsible and encourage them to take up challenging projects confidently.
- Time management empowerment
Time management empowerment allows employees to choose when and where to work. This freedom will help them perform better and deliver quality work.
- Shared information empowerment
Shared-information empowerment is when the leaders or managers openly communicate critical business information. It increases transparency and provides employees with a sense of belongingness.
Having listed the types of employee empowerment, let’s understand its various benefits.
3) Benefits of employee empowerment
An empowered organization creates a positive and high-performance work environment. Enlisted below are some of the other benefits of employee empowerment:
3.1. Boosts accountability and productivity
Managers must trust their employees’ skills and abilities and delegate tasks accordingly. For instance, in a software development project, managers can assign the development team to take complete responsibility for developing the software, from creating the product roadmap the strategy involved, etc.
This will help the team to be proactive in taking ownership of the work and bringing out their creativity. Furthermore, delegating employees with critical responsibilities makes them more accountable and responsible towards work, thereby improving productivity and performance.
3.2. Eliminates micromanagement and fosters innovation
According to a survey, 68% of employees said micromanagement decreased their morale, and 55% claimed it had hurt their productivity.
Numerous statistics have proven that micromanagement negatively impacts employees’ mental health, trust, and confidence. Moreover, micromanaging curbs employees’ productivity and performance as they are under excessive supervision.
To eliminate this, managers can grant employees the independence to work and make decisions. They should also encourage them to contribute ideas and convert them if appropriate. It will build the workforce’s trust and instill a sense of achievement. This way, organizations can boost employee morale, improve work quality and promote innovation and creativity.
3.3. Improves customer satisfaction
Simon Sinek rightly says that “customers will never love a company unless its employees love it first.” Therefore, organizations must empower their workforce so that they create positive experiences for the customers. For this, employers must give autonomy to the employees to solve customer-facing issues. For instance, a customer is unhappy with the product bought from an online portal. An empowered customer service executive can satisfy the customer by giving specific options to exchange the product, offering discounts, free delivery, etc.
This way, employees will push their limits and make quick decisions to handle the issues faced by the customers proactively. Moreover, when customers get solutions to their problems quickly and are satisfied with the services, they are likely to recommend your products to others, thereby leading to business growth. Thus, employee empowerment leads to improved operational efficiency and better customer satisfaction.
3.4. Facilitates professional growth of employees
Organizations should facilitate learning and development programs to empower the workforce and foster employees’ professional growth. It helps employees identify their true potential, undertake multifaceted projects, and channel their efforts into achieving better results.
Techniques like skill building, on-the-job training, shadowing opportunities, cross-functional collaboration, etc., will help the workforce to diversify their portfolios and skillsets. Additionally, mentoring, coaching, blended learning, etc., will boost their morale and make them more efficient. These measures will enhance their engagement, productivity, and quality of deliverables.
3.5 Improves retention of top talent
One of the significant components of employee empowerment is assigning tasks to the workforce that help nurture their skills and abilities. This will motivate employees to develop new skills and give their best in completing the tasks. Additionally, methods like 360-degree feedback, recognizing the efforts, and executing the ideas of the resources will keep them happier. This way, employees feel respected and will stay in the company for the long haul.
Moreover, enabling the employees to express their ideas and opinions and involving them in the decision-making processes will boost their confidence, helps them perform better, and increases their engagement. This will further enhance job satisfaction, and organizations can retain top talent, thus promoting growth and profits.
Knowing the benefits of employee empowerment, let’s see how resource management can help empower the workforce.
4) How can advanced resource management software help empower employees?
In the modern business world, empowering employees is imperative for companies to outperform their competitors and enable the workforce to work more effectively and efficiently. Saviom’s advanced features and functionalities will allow organizations to empower and unleash workforce potential.
Here is how:
The enterprise-level tool provides a bird’s eye view of the resources and their attributes like skills, availability, competencies, etc. This will enable managers to identify and allocate the right resource to the task. Additionally, the visibility into the resources’ skill inventory will help formulate effective retention strategies.
The capacity planning feature enables managers to foresee the skill gaps of resources in advance. Then, based on the insights, managers can implement training/upskilling, etc., to bridge skill gaps and promote employees’ professional growth.
Furthermore, the collaboration feature enables managers to communicate and collaborate efficiently with the team, delegate tasks, and share their ideas, insights, feedback, etc. This empowers employees to strengthen their creativity and innovation.
The open seat feature helps managers to create vacancies and publish across the enterprise notifying all the relevant resources. Accordingly, employees can show interest, and managers can assign the best-fit resource to the task. When the workforce chooses work of their interest, they will go the extra mile to achieve the desired results.
Thus, a resource management tool can add to the benefits by providing employees with a supportive and empowered environment.
5) Wrapping Up
A leader is great not because he has power but because of his or her ability to empower others – John C Maxwell
An empowered workplace is where the company leaders establish trust, be transparent in setting expectations and provide autonomy to their employees to take risks confidently. Combining the best practices of employee empowerment with robust resource management software will enhance the productivity and profitability of the organization.
