Employee Empowerment la gì

Employee empowerment is defined as the ways in which organizations provide their employees with a certain degree of autonomy and control in their day-to-day activities. This can include having a voice in process improvement, helping to create and manage new systems and tactics, and running smaller departments with less oversight from higher-level management.

A key principle of employee empowerment is providing employees the means for making important decisions and helping ensure those decisions are correct. When deployed properly, this should result in heightened productivity and a better quality of employee work and work life.

How Does Employee Empowerment Work?

Employee empowerment varies based on an organization's culture and work design. However, empowerment is based on the concepts of job enlargement and job enrichment. Job enlargement differs from job enrichment in that job enlargement is horizontal expansion and job enrichment is considered vertical.

• Job enlargement: Changing the scope of the job to include a greater portion of the horizontal process.
  • Example: A bank teller not only handles deposits and disbursement, but also distributes traveler's checks and sells certificates of deposit.
• Job enrichment: Increasing the depth of the job to include responsibilities that have traditionally been carried out at higher levels of the organization.
  • Example: The teller also has the authority to help a client fill out a loan application, and to determine whether or not to approve the loan.

As these examples show, employee empowerment requires:

• Training in the skills necessary to carry out the additional responsibilities
• Access to information on which decisions can be made
• Initiative and confidence on the part of the employee to take on greater responsibility

Employee empowerment also means giving up some of the power traditionally held by management, which means managers also must take on new roles, knowledge, and responsibilities. However, this does not mean that management relinquishes all authority, delegates all decision-making, and allows operations to run without accountability. It requires a significant investment of time and effort, especially from management, to develop mutual trust, assess and add to individuals' capabilities, and develop clear agreements about roles, responsibilities, risk taking, and boundaries.

What Does an Empowered Organizational Structure Look Like?

Employee empowerment often also calls for restructuring the organization to reduce levels of the hierarchy or to provide a more customer- and process-focused organization.

Employee empowerment is often viewed as an inverted triangle of organizational power. In the traditional view, management is at the top while customers are on the bottom; in an empowered environment, customers are at the top while management is in a support role at the bottom.

A distinction is made between performance and attitudinal outcomes. The consequences of team empowerment can be shown in three models. In this, the organisational leaders take action in stage one (inputs), those actions affect employee experiences in stage two (process) and important outcomes result from positive employee orientations toward work in stage three (outputs).

Organisations are no longer a one way sheet. Independent entrepreneurship and initiative are needed at every level of the organisation. Hierarchal structure is giving way to flat organisations, specially in knowledge-based industries. Employees need to be provided with resources and technical know-how in an environment which permits them to take decisions quickly and act in time. Boon and Kurtz (1998) define employee empowerment as ‘enlargement of employee jobs to make decisions about their work without supervisory approval while still creating value for customers’ Delery and Doty (19%) consider it ‘a process of multiplying power or greater autonomy in an organization.

Empowerment involves encouraging employees to take active role in organisational work, involve themselves by taking responsibility and enable and empower them with authority to take decisions.

Empowerment plans should include sharing of information on company’s goals and objectives, trust building through team work, providing support system to enable employees to take challenges at job, performance evaluation and feedback system, skill building and developing leadership qualities. All members need to be empowered in an organisation. Power should not be looked as a zero-sum game – one person’s gain as loss of another – but as empowering all to achieve organisational goals.

Employee Empowerment – Top 5 Benefits: Increased Productivity, Reduced Costs, Improved Quality, Competitive Edge & Better Job Satisfaction and Retention

1. Increased Productivity:

A lot of time is saved when employees can take their own decisions and do not have to wait for approval from senior levels. Workflow is not disturbed due to unnecessary hassles, and delays are avoided. The increased sense of responsibility motivates employees to try out innovative methods of doing work.

Employees derive more satisfaction from their work as their contribution towards the organizational goals is increased. Higher job satisfaction coupled with saving of precious time results in higher productivity.

2. Reduced Costs:

By taking their own decisions, employees save the time and efforts of top management. Since there is a high level of decentralization in an organization where employees are empowered, the need for middle level managers is considerably lower. Properly trained employees are also less likely to waste resources or have an accident. All these benefits collectively reduce the unnecessary expenditures of the organization.

3. Improved Quality:

Employee empowerment requires that the employees are properly trained in order to take good managerial decisions. Adequate resources are also provided to them to enable them to tackle day-to- day affairs in an efficient manner.

The senior managers delegate much of their work to other employees so that they can concentrate on more important tasks. Better efficiency in operations is achieved as a result of employee empowerment which leads to improved quality.

4. Competitive Edge:

Empowering employees can help a firm to gain a competitive edge over its competitors. Competitive, motivated and loyal employees can be created as a result of empowerment. It helps to utilize manpower in the best possible way. Employees get a chance to exercise their managerial and decision-making abilities while performing their job duties. A dedicated, loyal and empowered workforce helps to place the company ahead of its competitors.

5. Better Job Satisfaction and Retention of Employees:

Employee turnover is a big problem faced by many organizations in the modern world. Employee empowerment helps in curbing this problem by improving job satisfaction of the employees. Employees get to perform a variety of jobs at different levels requiring different skills and abilities. This creates a challenging and dynamic work environment where employees actually enjoy their jobs.

Employee Empowerment – Barriers to Empowering Employees: Incongruent Organization Culture, Rigid Control Systems and Inadequate Delegation of Authority

Following are some of the factors that may act as barriers to empowering employees:

Barrier # 1. Incongruent Organization Culture:

Empowerment succeeds when the culture of the organiza­tion is open and receptive to change. An organization’s culture is largely created through the philosophies of senior managers and their leadership traits and behaviours. If the philosophy of the senior management is authoritarian in nature, it will impede empowerment of employees. In such a scenario, authority tends to centralize at the top and employees do not get involved in decision-making at lower levels. Unless this type of organizational culture is changed, empower­ment will be neither possible nor effective.

Barrier # 2. Rigid Control Systems:

Many organizations design control systems on the premise that ‘people cannot be relied upon even for minor matters’. 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 stifle their leadership qualities, curb emergence of creative ideas, and to conform to the diktats of the organization. Empowerment cannot be ushered in or become effective unless such rigid systems are done away with.

Barrier # 3. Inadequate Delegation of Authority:

In many organizations, superiors hesitate to delegate authority to their subordinates for a variety of reasons. They include superiors’ love for author­ity, 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, thereby depriving lower-level employees of the much needed authority. Unless this situation is changed, employees will not feel empowered.

Employee Empowerment – How to Make Employee Empowerment Effective?

In the present-day competitive environment in which more emphasis is being put on the intrinsic motivational factors, and empowerment is one of the important factors, no progressive organization can overlook the importance of empowerment for its effectiveness.

The question is not whether to empower or not but the question is how to make empowerment more effective. There are four factors in a job which are intrinsically motivating. These are impact, competence, meaningfulness, and choice. When an employee feels that the completion of task will make a difference, such a task has impact on his performance.

When the employee has the ability, skills, and knowledge to perform a task, he feels the sense of competence. When the employee feels that the task assigned to him is worthwhile, he develops a sense of meaningfulness in the job. When the employee feels that he has freedom to make decisions and initiate actions, he experiences the sense of choice.

Empowerment can be undertaken on individual basis or on group basis. However, recent emphasis is on groups and empowered teams are created in organizations. One of the most popular empowered teams is quality circle.

Empowerment of Women:

Women constitute half of the world population, but a majority of them world over are engaged in the informal work sector. In large parts of the world, they are confined to home, looking after family, kitchen and low-paid occupations. In politics, administration and management, and professions like engineering medical, legal, etc., their participation is still limited.

This is not because women are inferior to men in terms of knowledge, initiative and energy to do higher level jobs. Cultural and social stigmas, customs and traditions have confined them to home and low level jobs. Wherever women get an opportunity, they show excellence in diverse fields. In recent years, education and constitutional guarantee of equal opportunity have helped women in many countries to come up on the front in industry and other professions where they have excelled. A Fortune 500 study (2008) found that big corporations with more women directors had significantly higher financial returns, including 53% higher return on equity, 24% higher return on sales and 67% higher return on invested capital.

Empowerment of women for higher administrative and managerial jobs require change in the attitudes of men holding senior positions, attitude of women themselves towards their capacity and ability to do jobs involving higher responsibility, and suitable working and service conditions for women which may reduce the conflicts in office. Organisations should provide training for new skills and higher managerial assignments to women, encourage them to participate in decision-marking and reward them for showing excellence without discrimination.

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