Employee Empowerment

What is Employee Empowerment?

Employee empowerment is a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of granting employees a certain level of autonomy to make independent decisions. It plays a key role in the organization’s performance management. Employees are provided a platform to carry out judgments and ensure accurate decision-making for empowerment. When employee empowerment is deployed rightly, it highly contributes to productivity, a platform to communicate personal and team goals, as well as a better quality of work life.

Google has set one of the best examples of employee empowerment:

• They give their employees the freedom to pursue new ideas and experiment.
• Google Cafes are built for easy interactions between employees to keep them engaged.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the essential factors of employee empowerment?

There are three factors of employee empowerment.

Clarity

This involves transparency and understanding of culture, policies, organization chart, job roles, responsibilities, promotion, etc.

Support

This involves support regarding professional and personal queries.

Autonomy

Employees can create better decisions on their own.

How many types of employee empowerment are there?

Employee empowerment can be categorized into many types, and organizations use them differently as per the need. Some of the types are:

• Self-empowerment
• Decision-making empowerment
• Financial empowerment
• Social empowerment
• Mutual empowerment

Why is employee empowerment essential for an organization?

Empowering employees can produce better outcomes for the organization, which are mentioned below.

• Ensures employee commitment to work by improving their morale.
• Enables employees to become more innovative and commendable.
• Promotes employees to deliver quality output.
• Improves job responsibility and reliability.
• Increases performance at every stage of work.

How can one empower employees correctly?

When employees’ decisions and problems are heard and appreciated for their contribution to the company targets, they feel more empowered and motivated. Therefore, recognition programs should be conducted, training should be provided, problems must be quickly solved, and feedback about practices must be collected to empower them.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of workforce empowerment?

Benefits of empowerment:

• Improves performance and morale.
• Improves work quality.
• Increases overall efficiency.
• Reduces employee turnover.

Drawbacks of empowerment:

• Misuse of authority.
• Highly expensive training needs.
• Threat to information confidentiality and security due to more access rights.