Drive your Business Faster with Employee Empowerment
Employee empowerment typically sounds like one of those new-fangled buzzwords that everyone likes to talk about, but no one seems to know how to achieve. In reality, it is an essential part of your business. Major brands all over the world are recognising that paying more attention to your employees’ experience pays dividends in terms of performance and productivity. We’ve talked about the impact of strategy and processes when it comes to efficiency and growth, but it is also crucial to ensure that your staff are properly connected with those elements through employee empowerment.
The Front Line
Generally speaking, most business have a collective of ‘front-facing’ staff. Often they are the people your customers interact with the most, which means they are the best reflection of what your brand is all about. They are usually the receptionists, drivers, couriers, waiters and the call centre operators. Also they are commonly among the more junior members of staff and the least connected to your overall strategy. That ‘disconnect’ can lead to a lack of training, lower morale, management distrust and an inability to fulfill the essential elements needed for your business to succeed. If these ‘forgotten’ employees don’t feel important to the company, you are likely to get little more than the bare minimum from them. Unlike with spreading the right company culture, good processes must work from the bottom up. A waiter with low motivation can put a customer off your restaurant permanently or a receptionist who doesn’t properly check schedules could mean you miss out on a vital meeting and offend a client.
Knowing your Worth
Processes are key to understanding the roles that are needed to accomplish your goals, but by sharing the details of what that means for individual staff, you empower them to know how their role impacts the business overall. For an employee, understanding how vital your role is and how it contributes to larger goals, gives them greater ownership of their responsibility to the company. Feeling as though they are part of something worthwhile will help improve their productivity and loyalty. That concept of purpose is perfectly underlined by the infamous story of when President Kennedy asked a NASA janitor what his role was, only to receive the reply “I’m putting a man on the moon.” No matter what industry or sector your company operates in, it is the employees who will make the difference when it comes to success and revenue generation. Just as processes help understand how each business function connects and operates, if your staff, from entry level to senior management, properly understand how they fit together they will work more efficiently as a whole. Research has also shown how employees who feel empowered by their leadership are more creative, are more likely to go the extra mile and have a greater trust in their management.
Un-emotive Empowerment
Processes that facilitate employee empowerment create an unemotional template and environment in which to determine role responsibilities, identify issues and initiate necessary changes or improvements. It enables businesses to create a culture in which staff are emboldened by their value to the company, keen to drive performance and comfortable to highlight issues before they cause lasting damage. Non-management staff can often find themselves wary of speaking out about problems for fear of retribution or punitive action. In the wrong environment their instinctive response will be emotional and that could mean they opt for avoidance, denial or concealment. Effective employee empowerment processes remove this fear and uncertainty so that staff are more motivated to look for ways to improve and are far more watchful for potential pitfalls or mistakes. This positive impact is also true for process measurement. When employees are informed about the measurements of the company’s processes and performance, as well as understand the overall goals, they are better able to evaluate their own role and its associated output. If they can see how their actions impact the business and how important it is that they perform at a certain level, they are far more likely to engage more seriously with their work.
Overall, clear and well-defined job parameters that are openly communicated enable the entire organisation to function better. Staff feel more engaged with the prosperity of the brand which encourages them to perform better, weed out obstacles, and reflect the best face of the company to its external audience.
If you would like to get expert advice on aligning your company’s strategy to further empower your employees, business processes and performance, get in touch with Identify Action at https://identifyaction.com/ or via email on action@identifyaction.com.
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