Employee empowerment enhances the feeling of self-efficiency and a sense of owning the job. This aspires the employees to do their jobs more effectively, because they get personally rewarded for accomplishing the targets. Employees become more energetic, passionate and sincere with the feeling of power.
Empowerment is a modern management tool to improve the quality of working life for ordinary employees. In an empowered environment, employees feel satisfied and perform better.
With renewed enthusiasm, they take part in managerial decision making, designing fair payment system, job enrichment schemes and appreciation awards.
Empowered employees are the energised lot. It is the responsibility of top management to design systems and processes that bring uniformity in bringing consistency in the performance of these energised and empowered employees. This definitely helps in building a long-term employment relationship.
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Learn about:- 1. Meaning of Employee Empowerment 2. Characteristics of Employee Empowerment 3. Elements 4. Stages 5. Importance 6. Principles 7. Strategies 8. Pre – Requisites 9. Conditions 10. Benefits 11. Barriers.
Employee Empowerment: Meaning, Process, Characteristics, Elements, Stages, Importance, Principles, Benefits and Barriers
Contents:
- Meaning of Employee Empowerment
- Characteristics of Employee Empowerment
- Elements of Employee Empowerment
- Stages of Employee Empowerment
- Importance of Employee Empowerment
- Principles of Employee Empowerment
- Strategies for Employee Empowerment
- Pre-Requisites for Effective Employee Empowerment
- Conditions of Effective Employee Empowerment
- Benefits of Employee Empowerment
- Barriers to Employee Empowerment
Employee Empowerment – Meaning
In traditional management system, the top management formulates policies and takes policy decisions, middle level managers use to execute the decisions, lower level managers take operative decisions and the workers implement the decisions. It was felt that lower level employees do not have the knowledge and skills to take decisions.
With increase in educational level, entry of qualified employees like MBAs, CAs, the management has realised that even employees at lower levels can take operational and executive decisions. This is possible if they are delegated with the required authority and responsibility. With liberalisation and modernisation, the availability of products and services has gone up and there is tough competition in the marketplace. Companies are empowering employees to serve the customer better without inconvenience. The customer does not have to go around various departments to sort his problems.
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It is humanly impossible for a manager to do all the work himself and therefore he has to delegate the work to team members. For this purpose, he has to assess the relative strength of the team members and find out who is interested in taking up additional task and learning from this experience. He has to strike a balance between over delegation and under delegation. The manager may transfer major responsibilities to team members without understanding the strengths of the members.
Under delegation may be due a sense of fear that the subordinate may not do the job well and he has to spend extra time in correcting the mistakes. Under delegation may also arise due to a sense of insecurity i.e. the subordinate may complete the task better than him and his importance may come down in the organisation.
Empowerment means enabling a lower level employee to take decisions required for carrying out his duties/responsibilities and implement the same.
Example – A loyal customer of a bank rings up customer service centre and asks for waiving credit card annual fees charged in the statement and the customer service centre executive takes a decision to waive the fees and informs the customer over the phone.
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With the advancement of industrial growth and development, the concept of employee empowerment has gained momentum.
Empowerment is non-financial incentive given to the employees. It is the feeling that employee owns the job and this feeling acts as a great motivator factor. Young job aspirants are looking for this empowerment in the business organisations.
Employee empowerment enhances the feeling of self-efficiency and a sense of owning the job. This aspires the employees to do their jobs more effectively, because they get personally rewarded for accomplishing the targets. Employees become more energetic, passionate and sincere with the feeling of power.
Empowerment is a modern management tool to improve the quality of working life for ordinary employees. In an empowered environment, employees feel satisfied and perform better. With renewed enthusiasm, they take part in managerial decision making, designing fair payment system, job enrichment schemes and appreciation awards.
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There is strong association between employee empowerment and employee satisfaction measured in terms of employee turnover, service quality, productivity level and customer satisfaction. The employee empowerment philosophy centres around ‘enabling, energising, engaging and enthusing’.
Empowerment is viewed as a means to give employees chances to make decision without consulting their superior. When empowered, employees feel they are given trust and authority by the organisation to make decision.
Since empowerment practices start with an employee’s knowledge of the job description and thus the employees are clear on their job scope. As part of empowerment, employees are trained to handle customer requests and problems, to handle different situations by making right decisions without consulting their higher-ups.
Decision making is the main focus of employee empowerment where employees are given a guideline during their training on what to follow to resolve a conflict, how to make a right decision, etc. Employees’ satisfaction is strongly affected by the working environment. Trust is the first stage in empowerment and this reduces the burden and gaps in management hierarchy.
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Empowered employees are the energised lot. It is the responsibility of top management to design systems and processes that bring uniformity in bringing consistency in the performance of these energised and empowered employees. This definitely helps in building a long-term employment relationship.
Employee Empowerment – Characteristics
1. Fear of facing task is taken as a challenge and adventure by employees.
2. Depending too much becomes mutual independence.
3. From lack of initiative on the part of the people, they start solving their own problems.
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4. Employee develops skills to work without supervision.
5. From scant training and development to continuous development.
6. Avoiding change is replaced with welcome change for the better.
7. Training and development responsibility of personnel becomes everybody’s responsibility.
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8. Lack of vision is changed to strong and focused vision.
9. Problem avoiding becomes problem solving.
10. Closed communication becomes open and sharing ideas, skills and information.
Employee Empowerment – Elements: Self Confidence and Firm Determination, Personal Control, Faith and Trust, Meaningfulness and Task Impact
The important elements of empowerment are as follows:
1. Self Confidence and Firm Determination:
Empowered employees have a high level of self-esteem. They have a strong desire to advance in the organization. This need in the employees makes them strive hard to reach the higher levels in the organization. They try to solve all problems themselves by developing skills and competence. This builds in them self-confidence which enables them to recover quickly from any setback. Hence, they are on their job, no hurdles can refrain them from growth.
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Empowerment implies personal control over one’s work situation. Empowered employees know what the organization expect from them and what can they expect from the organization in return. They are independent in their thought and do not mind turning the last stone in order to achieve organizational goals.
3. Faith and Trust:
Empowered individuals are open and honest. They tend to have faith in themselves and they feel they will always be treated equitably by their managers. They trust their superiors and communicate their stand on organizational issues freely with them. They trust their superiors and feel that they will always be treated fairly by them.
4. Meaningfulness:
Empowered employees are known to deliver lasting benefits to not only their organization but also to their peer group and society with their efforts. Their meaningful actions produce outcomes which benefit the general public and make the business environment healthier.
5. Task Impact:
Empowered employee has a belief that completion of task will make a difference to the organization and also to him. Impact of task is felt very prominently when employees perceive that their behaviour has caused useful outcomes for all in and outside the organization. Empowered employees are intrinsically motivated and do not require external rewards for doing work which will have desired results for organization, all groups in the organization as well as for them.
Employee Empowerment – 5 Important Stages
Empowerment means giving authority to the employees to take decisions and providing them with financial resources to implement those decisions. Empowerment provides authority to take decisions within one’s area of operations without having to get approval from anyone else. The operatives are encouraged to use their initiative to do the things the way they like to do.
Empowerment consists of 5 stages:
Stage-I – Identifying Conditions of Powerlessness – The process of employee empowerment starts from the identification of conditions prevailing in the industry, that lead to the feeling of powerlessness to the employees. This feeling may be due to centralised organisation structures, poor communication, authoritarian styles of leadership, low incentive plans etc. So the first step lies in the diagnosis of the problem.
Stage-II – Implement Empowerment Strategies – The next stage to the process of employee empowerment is the introduction of empowerment strategies and techniques like participative management, quality circles, job enrichment, implement merit-pay systems etc.
Stage-III – To Provide Self-Efficiency Information – Self-efficiency is believing in one’s effectiveness, being more confident and self-assured. Self-efficiency leads to more success and effectiveness and removes the feeling of powerlessness. So this stage seeks to provide self-efficiency information to the employees.
Stage-IV – Generation of Empowerment Feeling – The removal of the feeling of powerlessness and the generation of self-efficacy leads to empowerment. Self-efficacy straightens effort-performance and task accomplishment. These behavioural consequences lead to the feeling of empowerment.
Stage-V – Empowerment Leads to High Performance – With the feeling of empowerment, the employees start taking initiative in decision-making and share the authority of ownership and control. Empowered employees feel that the organisation belongs to them, they feel more responsible, do the work more effectively and also enjoy the work more. This leads to high performance, more productivity and boost morale of the employees.
Employee Empowerment – Importance: Highly Competitive Environment, Globalization, Knowledge Workers, Dynamics of Speed and Human Resource Development
Modern organizations have to empower their employees for reasons of excellence and customer satisfaction. They have to put their employees on jobs that enhance their capabilities to work independently in future.
The following challenges faced by business organizations these days demand empowerment for employees at all levels:
1. Highly Competitive Environment:
In this highly competitive environment scenario faced by all organizations, it becomes imperative to work closely with employees for long run survival. Today, when customers demand an increasingly innovative product or service, the organization must work in close co-operation with its employees to satisfy them rather than run after changing processes and technology.
More globalization means more competition, and more competition means more pressure to be “world class”. This implies, making costs lower, making employees more productive and doing thing better and less expensively. This globalization brings both benefits as well as threats.
Both workers and companies, therefore, have to work harder and smarter than they did before globalization. Organizations cannot achieve world class performance unless its employees are empowered and they work with full confidence and integrity.
When organizations have employees who are valued, trusted and open in their thought, they refuse to accept the old power conditions and also job related control systems. They want organizations to provide them with the work climate which allows them to take work related decisions themselves.
They want opportunities for exercising control over many work situations. If these opportunities are denied to them, they look for such opportunities in other organizations. The shift of skilful and competent employees to competitors uproots the organizations’ goodwill in the market.
Empowerment of employees encourages new ideas, innovation and creativity. Empowered employees can adapt to change in the environment very fast as compared to others. The environment of business is such these days that slow decision making makes you lose growth opportunities. Empowered employees do not let opportunities go so easily. They take speedy decisions and make organizations dynamic.
5. Human Resource Development:
Employee Empowerment helps the organization in developing future leaders. Empowered employees are more adaptive, responsive and become good leaders in the long run. Empowerment helps to reveal the covert talent of employees and good managers always use this for the benefit of the organization.
Employee Empowerment – Principles
1. Define the responsibilities of each employee clearly.
2. Give them authority and responsibilities for the assigned task.
3. Set standard of excellence.
4. Provide sufficient training to achieve the standard with minimum stress.
5. Use feedback as a tool to point out their performance.
6. Create mutual trust to have transparency in all matters.
7. Convince and counsel employees when required.
8. Treat the employees with dignity and respect irrespective of their status.
9. Power and information should be delegated, decentralised and diffused for reducing the time delay and also to improve the decision making skills of the people.
10. Encourage cross-functional teams for making innovative ideas and better decisions.
Employee Empowerment – Strategies for Leaders to Pratice How to Empower
Here are the strategies for empowerment that make the members of the organisation to work with little guidance in line with organisational vision, mission, objectives and values. The leaders need to train their senior managers to create an environment of empowerment for lifelong association.
Here are select strategies for leaders to practice how to empower:
1. Foster Open Communication:
Bottom-up or open communication is much powerful when compared to top-down communication. In open communication, employees can present their thoughts, feelings and observations known easily and regularly. Use the feedback effectively and constructively. Never think of antagonising employees for their criticism.
Appreciate and reward the new ideas. Focus on creativity and innovation so that the organisation becomes a buoyant one with high degree of new thinking and different perspectives.
2. Reward Self-Improvement:
To overcome complacency and stagnation among the employees, encourage and reward them for self-improvement, have budget and time in place for personal development and training. Motivate employees to set a plan for growth and reward them as they advance. This is one sure way of creating leadership opportunities.
3. Encourage Safe Failure:
Let the employees experiment on a continuous basis. Even if they fail, keep on encouraging them to move forward. They should not feel that failure will cost their future. This makes them more risk averse. Promote an environment where they can try new things while protecting the interests of the organisation. Develop laboratory environment to test new ideas and learn from the failures, if any.
Unless the employees will gain understanding and feel comfortable, they cannot focus on testing their new ideas on the field and bring innovation in the organisational perspectives. Exhibit high degree of trust and support in the employees’ ability to accomplish a work assignment.
4. Provide Sufficient Authority and Plenty of Contexts:
Delegate adequate authority so that the employees can develop the feeling of “I can do my job” and then address every problem in their work front. Further, give them ideas to experiment. Give them every opportunity to clearly understand the core values, purpose and direction of the company so that they can easily make consistent decisions and take appropriate action at any junction. Promote shared vision to develop leadership across cadres.
5. Encourage to Work beyond the Given Role:
The vision of each job needs to be articulated. The employees need to think beyond their job roles and description within their functional area so that they bring dynamism into their own well defined roles. Also support their independence in the job roles by providing necessary skills and resources.
Encouraging cross-learning so that they overcome the silo approach and develop an integrated perspective of the entire organisation by benefiting from each other’s skills and knowledge.
6. Fix Accountability for Results:
To understand the consequences of failure and need for making an extra effort, every employee needs to be held accountable for results. Also keep appreciating and reward their efforts through consistent and diligent measurement of performance for their high morale.
To sum up, employee empowerment is a means by which the employees are given the authority to analyse situations autonomously and take proactive decisions. An empowered employee develops a sense of a sense of ownership towards the company and takes up the responsibility to take it to greater heights of excellence.
Employee Empowerment – Pre-Requisites for Effective Employee Empowerment in an Organisation at all Levels
There are some basic requisites for empowerment to get accepted in an organization at all levels:
(a) Accountability of Employees:
Empowerment will work only in those departments and areas in the organization where workers can be held responsible for non-performance. Empowered employees should always be held responsible for results. The intention of the management should not be to punish them for poor performance but to encourage them to work more seriously towards mutually agreed goals. When employees understand this concept, they will work with more effort to task accomplishment. If accountability of a group cannot be fixed, empowerment is not going to give effective results.
(b) Participation of Employees:
Empowerment works where employees are encouraged to be participative in decision-making. Where employees’ initiative is taken as threat, empowerment become less meaningful. Therefore, the threats which come in the way of participation should be removed and proper training should be given to employees so that they are able to effectively participate in many decisions and make organization grow.
Empowerment cannot happen when there is no free flow of information in the organization. Superiors may not let important and resourceful information pass down the hierarchy. Subordinates will, therefore, not be able to enhance their knowledge and talents in the organization e.g. information about training programs may be given to only a couple of employees and not others.
This will refrain them from attending training programs necessary for empowerment on their jobs. Some who are offered this training will get empowered but not others. Lack of proper access to organizational information leads to mistrust and lack of commitment.
Knowledge organizations are the ones which encourage their employees to be innovative and find new ways of doing the tasks assigned to them. In such a supportive environment, employees feel confident to take timely decisions on crucial task issues. They trust the subordinates so much that they keep no stone unturned in achieving the tasks. When they start feeling that their hard work will have an impact on organization’s growth, they go ego- bound to give their level best at work.
Employee Empowerment – Conditions for Effective Employee Empowerment
In order for empowerment to take root and thrive organisations must encourage-
i. Participation
ii. Innovation
iii. Access to information
iv. Accountability.
Other conditions to make empowerment successful include:
i. Provide the information of the company to all employees
ii. Employees should have multi-skills and knowledge
iii. Employees should assume power to make substantive decisions
iv. Employees should understand all the jobs
v. Management should create and maintain the culture
vi. Management should delegate authority and provide power
vii. Management should encourage the employees to take risk, and
viii. Management should reward the employees adequately.
Employee Empowerment – 17 Important Benefits
Empowered employees are a great asset to the organisation.
There are numerous benefits that come from employee empowerment like:
i. Optimum utilisation of employees
ii. High degree of employee motivation
iii. Enhancement of business performance
iv. High degree of involvement and participation
v. Sense of high esteem
vi. Personal growth and development
vii. Greater sense of achievement
viii. A learning environment opportunity
ix. Enhance capability to accept challenges
x. Encourage problem-solving ability
xi. High quality products
xii. Better decision-making
xiii. Less absenteeism and low turnover
xiv. Loyal customers
xv. High quality-lower costs
xvi. Greater productivity, and
xvii. Greater organisation effectiveness.
Employee Empowerment – Barriers
Empowerment is bound to be a failure if top management of the organization is not consistently involved in it. Not only the involvement but also continuous support on the part of top management leads to fruitful results. The management has to take the concept of empowerment seriously and invest their time and skills in bringing about a revolutionary change in the outlook of all employees.
They have to allow empowerment within fixed boundaries i.e., Empowerment without limits may become dysfunctional for the organization. It should also not be forgotten that empowerment in the untrained hands always lead to disastrous results. Therefore, empowerment should be experimented first only with those employees who are trained and prepared for it. There are many reasons which inhibit empowerment in the organizations.
They are as follows:
Barrier # (a) Insecurity in the Manager’s Mindset:
Some managers are personally against employee empowerment on account of their personal insecurities. They visualize a threat in empowering their employees. They fear losing power-position in the organization by empowering their subordinates. Empowerment does lead to dilution of power of the superiors, thus, managers are unwilling to give it up.
They feel that if they empower employees with authority, their own efforts towards accomplishment of tasks will go unrewarded. Some managers may not be against power dilution but are very sensitive towards the costs associated with employee’s wrong decisions. They, thus, do all the work themselves and leave the routine jobs for employees. This makes the means become and end in itself.
Barrier # (b) Insecurity in the Employee’s Mindset:
Empowerment has been a major issue with many organizations on account of personal insecurities in the mind of employees. Many employees are fearful of taking up more authority as they feel they would not be able to fulfil their responsibilities with added power. Some employees are of the thought that they may be punished for taking initiative. Thus, organizations cannot grow when there is hesitation or fear in the mind of subordinates, against taking up empowerment.
Barrier # (c) Unhealthy Organizational Climate:
Some organizations have a traditional structure where all superiors are authoritative or benevolent authoritative leaders. Such leaders have a desire to keep more power with them and dispense with little power for subordinates. They try to justify their stand by pointing out the fact that innovative ideas cannot be handed over to junior management. Such ideas of job enrichment, job enlargement etc. are kept only for very few trained employees and others are ignored.
In such a climate, empowerment of employees is always a problematic area. In organizations where managers are participative and democratic, employee empowerment is very seriously considered. The leaders in such open- system are not reluctant to part with power and they expect their subordinates to use their skills in work accomplishment without any fear. In such an organizational culture empowerment is very effective.
Barrier # (d) Incompetent Delegator:
All managers have to delegate a portion of their work to subordinates with certain broad limits within which they can operate. Delegation refers to the assignment of some work to subordinates. A competent delegator empowers his subordinates and enhances his workers commitment.
He coordinates the work of all his employees and takes timely decisions. On the other hand, an incompetent delegator is not able to link empowered delegation with task accomplishment. In case of incompetent superiors, work delegation is there but empowered subordinates fail to use it for accomplishment of work effectively.
Barrier # (e) Unwillingness to Delegate Authority:
In many organisations, superiors hesitate to delegate authority to their subordinates for a variety of reasons. These include lack of confidence in the abilities of subordinates, fear of exposure, criticism for the faulty working of subordinates, etc. This results in the concentration of authority in the hands of a few individuals at the top. Empowerment is only possible through sharing of authority with the lower levels.
Barrier # (f) Dependency of Subordinates:
Some subordinates do not like authority to take decisions; they want to be directed by their superiors. This creates barrier to empowerment.
Barrier # (g) Static Organisational Culture:
An organisation’s culture is largely created through the vision of senior managers and their leadership behaviour. If the philosophy of the senior management is authoritarian in nature, it will impede empowerment of employees.
In such a scenario, authority tends to get centralized at the top and employees at the lower levels do not get involved in decision-making. Unless this type of culture is changed, empowerment will not be possible.
Barrier # (h) Rigid Controls:
Top managers of many organisations have negative assumptions about the employees and so impose rigid control systems. Such control systems reduce employees to nothing but cogs-in-the-wheel. This leads to creation of a monotonous work environment in which employees with initiative are forced to curb creative ideas and to conform to the diktats of the management. Empowerment cannot be ushered in unless such rigid systems are done away with.