39 Employee Empowerment

Dr. Radha Kanwal Sharma

1.      Learning Outcome

2.      Introduction

3.      Characteristics of an empowered organization

4.      Six dimensions of empowerment

5.      Guidelines for introducing empowerment

6.      Principles of empowerment

7.      Benefits of empowerment

8.      Why empowerment fails?

9.      Limitations of empowerment

10.  Summary

1. Learning Outcomes:

After completing this module the students will be able to:

·  Understand the concepts of employee empowerment.

·  Benefits of empowerment

·  Principles of empowerment

·  Pitfalls that can lead to empowerment failure

2.  Introduction

These days many firms like to focus on gaining a competitive advantage in the market. New technology, innovative product designs, economies of scale, good marketing strategies, excellent customer services and many other elements can be the factors that add up for the advantages. Yet, human resources are the most important assets of an enterprise as an organization‟s success or failure depends on their qualifications and performance. The employees are the repository of knowledge, skills and abilities. Unlike technologies, products and processes; human resources of an enterprise can‟t be imitated by the competitors. Therefore, the employees are the most important strategic resource of a company.

Empowerment is the process which has evolved in response to the trend towards a greater degree of responsibility and involvement amongst employees in the running of the organization. This trend has emerged as most of the organizations have realized employee involvement and recognized the capacity of the human resources to improve and enhance business performance.

Empowerment is mainly concerned with establishing and building trust between management and employees, and motivating their participation. It is one of the modern concepts which are believed to improve the human element in the modern organizations to achieve high levels of cooperation, team spirit, self-confidence, innovation, independent thinking and entrepreneurship. Empowerment is basically a motivational concept associated with „enabling‟ rather than „delegating‟. Enabling implies the creation of conditions by management so that people can experience enhanced motivation to achieve the desired level of performance. In addition to providing conditions like offering the necessary support and reorganization, management is also expected to remove conditions that foster powerlessness of employees.

Wellins defines employee empowerment as „the process of passing authority and responsibility to individuals at lower levels in the organizational hierarchy‟. To achieve empowerment, managers should ensure that employees at the lowest hierarchical levels have the right mix of information (regarding processes, quality, customer feedback and events), knowledge (related to work) and rewards (related to business results and growth within the capability and contribution), to work autonomously or independently of management control and direction.

Employee empowerment does not mean that management abandon from its responsibility of performance or for leading the organization. Rather, in an employee empowered organization, management’s responsibility comes to create and foster an environment in which it is apparent that employee input is desired and cultivated. The management must trust and communicate with employees. When employees are empowered, their autonomy and confidence increase. This creates job satisfaction and leads to higher levels of productivity.

Theoretical Approaches to Empowerment: Three theoretical approaches have been used to study empowerment: socio-structural perspective, psychological approach, and the critical perspective.

The socio-structural perspective focuses its attention on developing or redesigning organizational polices, practices, and structures to give employees power, authority, and influence over their work.

The psychological approach focuses on enhancing and enabling personal effectiveness by helping employees develop their sense of meaning, competency, self-determination, and impact. The critical perspective challenges the notion of employee empowerment and argues that efforts to create empowerment may actually lead to more, even if less-obvious, controls over employees.

3. Characteristics of empowered organization

Organizations with a high level of job autonomy exhibit the following characteristics:

1.  These organizations invest a lot of time and effort in hiring. This is to make sure that new recruits can handle workplace freedom.

2.   These are flat in hierarchy.

3.      Loose guidelines are set, so that workers know their decision making parameters.

4.      Accountability is of paramount importance. Results matter more than the process.

5.      High quality performance is always expected.

6.      Openness and strong communication is encouraged.

7.      Employee satisfaction is the core value of the organization.

4.  Six dimensions of empowerment

An empowerment process involves change, which may be very painful and frustrating for employees. This process also takes up lot of energy and time. Henkel claimed that before undertaking the process of employee empowerment, an organization has to work on six parameters to study its current set up. Detailed information gathered about these parameters, will help top management to bring required changes in the system to successfully implement the empowerment process. These six dimensions of empowerment are:

1.      Communication: How is the information in the organization communicated? What is the tone of the communication? How much information is required to be shared among employees and how much is actually shared?

2.  Value of people: Are people free to give their opinions and ideas in the organization? Are these ideas and opinions valued? How is this shown? How do employees respond to „out of the box‟ ideas?

3.   Ambiguity: Is there tolerance for ambiguity? How do people respond to trial and error? Do people experiment? Are they allowed to experiment? How are their mistakes perceived?

4. Concept of power: How is power perceived in the organization? Where do the power centers lie in the organization chart? Is the power shared? What level of power is distributed?

5.  Information: Do people have all the information they need? Do people share this information? Are they awarded for sharing this information? What is the level of trust among employees?

6.  Learning: Is the organization, a learning organization? Or is it the business as usual? Information gathered on these dimensions should be used in designing the empowerment process and as a part of curriculum for training programme on empowerment for individuals, groups as well the whole organization.

4.1 Factors affecting empowerment

Empowerment is affected by three major factors: technology, customers and organization. Technology: with advancement of technology, computers and other tools can perform all routine tasks that were formally performed by people. This type of tools empowers employees to perform higher end work for which creativity and initiative are required. The management should therefore, provide training and information to employees so that they can perform beyond routine work.

Customers: customers are becoming more and more aware. They also empower the employees by depending upon them more than ever. When such things happen in the organization, the engaged employee should be appreciated and rewarded about his work.

Organization: Companies that are advanced technologically are empowering customers through internet. At the company website, the customers can make their own decisions and purchase without seeking any help from employees or the organization. The organizations need to find better ways to serve them since it is easier for customers to move to a competitor.

5. Guidelines for introducing empowerment:

There are certain guidelines for the organizations for introducing empowerment at the work place:

1.      It must be analyzed and understood why the organization is making the change and what it wants to achieve;

2.      As empowerment is long and slow process which induces change, very strong leaders should be selected to head such a

change;

3.      There should be involvement of employees in planning how to introduce empowerment;

4.      Transition project teams should be created to test and coordinate efforts and communicate results;

5.      Employees should be provided training in new skills and behaviors;

6.      Establishing of symbols of change;

7.      Achievements should be acknowledged as well as rewarded.

6.  Principles of empowerment

An organization must abide by the following principles while initiating the employee empowerment process.

1.  Provide the right skill set for the job: Employees cannot effectively complete assigned tasks if they do not have the necessary skills. It is vital for an organization to assess the gaps between the current and required skills. Training must be provided to employees to improve and increase their skills. Therefore, if fort an empowered workforce, employees need to be offered appropriate training.

2.   Grant sufficient autonomy: The second means for empowerment of employees is to provide them with adequate authority to decide on how to complete their tasks. They need to be given allowed to complete their assignments in any manner they choose; as long as it complies with the parameters and time lines set by the organization.

3. Clearly articulate the scope of individual’s job: It is paramount that employees have a clear idea of how their role fits into the overall scheme of the organization. Employees need to know their boundaries so they don’t step on others’ toes or create inefficiency through redundancy. When this is shared in a meaningful manner, it empowers them with the broader perspective of the organization‟s overall mission, vision, goals and strategic plans.

4.  Provide adequate information and resources: Employees must have access to all the information they require in order to make informed and appropriate decisions and be able to problem solve issues. Therefore supplying information and allocating the necessary resources empowers the employees to perform their responsibilities to the best of their abilities.

5. Build employee’s confidence: When employees have been given autonomy and offered the opportunity to improve and increase their skills; they will feel valued, supported, and appreciated. When one feels this way it increases their confidence which will in turn increase their performance levels because they now believe they have the ability to achieve success. The various ways to boost employees‟ confidence include:

a)   Providing growth opportunities to the employees by giving them more challenging tasks. This demonstrates that you

value your employees and their personal development

b) Exhibiting greater trust and support in the employee‟s ability to accomplish a work assignment by not micro-managing

their tasks.

c)  Encouraging cross-learning so that employees benefit from each other‟s skills and knowledge. This can also increase

productivity if people are absent.

d)     Acknowledging and rewarding the employees for their accomplishments.

6. Guide with positive feedback: Providing positive feedback for tasks done well and guiding employees about best practices, gives encouragement to the employees. When employees feel appreciated, performance improves and creativity is enhanced.

7. Share Goals and Direction: When possible, involve employees in goal setting and planning. They add value, knowledge, ideas, insight and experience that may not be available with senior team. They should be involved in goal setting on the department level .The goals should be measurable and observable. Managers should ensure to share the picture of a positive outcome with the employees responsible for accomplishing the results. This step will convey the employees about what is successful and acceptable deliverable. Empowered employees can then chart their course without close supervision.

8.  Delegate authority and impact opportunities, not just more work: Managers should not just delegate the routine work; other important tasks should such as the important meetings, the committee memberships that influence product development and decision making, and the projects that people and customers notice etc should also be delegated. This will enable the employee to grow and develop new skills. This also leaves more free time to managers who can focus attention on more important other work.

9. Solve problems, don’t pinpoint problem people: People and problems should be treated separately. When a problem occurs, analyze what is wrong with the work system that caused the employees to fail, not what is wrong with the people. Worst case response to problems is to identify and punish the guilty.

10.  Listen to learn and ask questions to provide guidance: employees should be guided by asking questions, not by telling what to do. When an employee brings a problem to solve, he should be asked to give possible steps to solve that problem. This provides employees to demonstrate what they know and grow in the process.

11.  Encourage Safe Failure: employees should be given the opportunity to try new things in a way that doesn’t put the company in danger. Management should set up laboratory environments where employees can test new ideas and learn from the failures as well as the successes. This will help employees gain understanding and inclined towards innovating.

12.  Require Accountability: It is important for employees to know when they are meeting expectations and, when they are not. No one will maintain accountability if the consequences of failure are not understood. Managers need to be consistent and diligent in the measurement and rewards so employees are motivated to do their best.

8.Benefits of empowerment

It is now clearly understood that employee empowerment leads to following benefits:

1.      It helps in creation of an environment which encourages proactive approach to problem solving, accepting challenges;

2.      It leads to innovation and continuous improvement;

3.      Empowerment helps in optimum utilization of resources;

4.      It is an effective method of employee motivation;

5.      It leads to better business performance;

6.      It provides a sense of high self esteem and a high degree of involvement in the organization to the employees;

7.      It provides an opportunity for personal growth and development.

8.      Employees get  a greater sense of achievement;

9.      A network of empowered employees creates benefits like faster responses, loyal customers, high quality- lower costs products.

10.  Rate of absenteeism goes down;

11.  Lower employee turnover;

12.  Better decision making and better problem handling results;

13.  All above factors lead to better organizational effectiveness.

8. Why empowerment fails

It has been frequently seen that employee empowerment does not succeed completely. As this process emphasizes changing the mindset of managers as well as staff towards responsibility, accountability, autonomy and process of decision making, it has ample scope of going wrong, if not taken seriously. Some of the major pitfalls are due to following factors:

· Managers pay lip service to employee empowerment, but do not really believe in its power. Employee empowerment can seem like a “good” thing to do. But not doing it sincerely, keeping close check on employees and depriving them of autonomy leads to failure of this pursuit.

· Managers don‟t really understand what employee empowerment means. They have a vague notion that employee empowerment means you start a few teams that address workplace employee morale or safety issues. It is a wrong notion. Employee empowerment is a philosophy or strategy that enables people to make decisions about their job.

·  Managers fail to establish boundaries for employee empowerment. There are key areas of empowerment, which need attention. E.g. in the absence of the manager, what decisions can be made by staff members? What decisions can employees make day-by-day that they do not need to have permission or oversight to make? These boundaries must be defined or employee empowerment efforts fail.

· Managers first define the decision making authority and boundaries with staff, but then micromanage the work of employees. This is usually because managers do not trust staff to make good decisions. Employees usually know this and they either craftily make decisions on their own or hide their results or they come to managers for everything because they don‟t know what they really can control. This lack of trust made employee empowerment a joke.

· Managers have the tendency to second guess the decisions of employees who have been given the authority to make a decision. Management can help staff make good decisions by coaching, training, and providing necessary information. They can even model good decision making, but, unless a serious complication will result, it is not advised to undermine or change the decision that manager had empowered a staff person to make. Teach the employee to make a better decision next time. But managers should definitely not undermine employees‟ faith in their personal competence and in their trust, support, and approbation. If done, this will discourage employee empowerment for the future.

· Managers need to provide growth and challenge opportunities and goals that employees can aim for and achieve. Failures to provide a strategic framework, in which decisions have a compass and success measurements, jeopardize the opportunity for empowered behavior. Employees need direction to know how to practice empowerment.

·  If managers fail to provide the information and access to information, training, and learning opportunities needed for staff to make good decisions, the employee empowerment efforts fall short. The organization has the responsibility to create a work environment that helps foster the ability and desire of employees to act in empowered ways. Information is the key to successful employee empowerment.

· Managers abdicate all responsibility and accountability for decision making. When reporting staff are blamed or punished for failures, mistakes, and less than optimum results, the employees will flee from employee empowerment. Or, employees publicly start fault finding among themselves and other team to blame for failure. Failure of management to publicly support decisions and stand behind employees makes the staff feel deserted. This totally fails the empowerment effort.

· Managers allow barriers to impede the ability of staff members to practice empowered behavior. The organization has the responsibility to remove barriers that limit the ability of staff to act in empowered ways. These barriers can include time, tools, training, access to meetings and teams, financial resources, support from other staff members, and effective coaching.

· When employees feel under-compensated, under-titled for the responsibilities they take on, under-noticed, under-praised, and under-appreciated, there will be no results of employee empowerment. The basic needs of employees must be taken care of to enable employees put in the extra effort that people voluntarily invest in work.

· If managers dole out more responsibility than employee‟s positions requires and cause employees to feel overworked or underpaid for the work expected, empowerment efforts get into danger. Employees want empowerment, but they don‟t want managers to take advantage of them. This should be ensured that the responsibilities match the job, and that the person is doing the job as per the job description .

Avoidance of these pitfalls results into success of empowerment initiative. As a result employees grow, feel competent, capable, and successful.

9. Limitations of empowerment

Although, employee empowerment is an attempt to improve and enrich the work culture of the organization, it is not without its limitations.

How much of the empowerment is appropriate for the organization remains a paradox to be addressed by experts. It has been seen that too much of empowerment in the organizations has made the situation chaotic, disturbed and dysfunctional, and in turn making the leader autocratic. It is therefore very important to decide how much empowerment is optimum for the organization. This paradox originates from attempts to grant employees as much control over their work as they need while at the same time recognizing that empowering employees create certain problems. Too much or too little empowerment in a given situation is dysfunctional. While empowerment grants autonomy, it has been seen, in some cases, confidence levels can be taken too far and end up crossing the line into arrogance. Arrogant employees are difficult to deal with, don’t take direction well and can become insubordinate. Working in this type of work environment takes its toll on employees and they once again become dissatisfied with their job and productivity levels decrease.

11. Summary

Empowerment is the process of passing authority and responsibility to individuals at lower levels in the organizational hierarchy. To achieve empowerment, managers should ensure that employees at the lowest hierarchical levels have the right mix of information (regarding processes, quality, customer feedback and events), knowledge (related to work) and rewards (related to business results and growth within the capability and contribution), to work autonomously or independently of management control and direction. Every organization has to analyze its existing set up, and work on changing it to suit the empowerment needs of employees. To achieve empowerment, managers should ensure that employees at the lowest hierarchical levels have the right mix of information (regarding processes, quality, customer feedback and events), knowledge (related to work) and rewards (related to business results and growth within the capability and contribution), to work autonomously or independently of management control and direction. It is very important to decide how much empowerment is optimum for the organization. Too much or too little empowerment in a given situation is dysfunctional. While empowerment grants autonomy, it has been seen, in some cases, confidence levels can be taken too far and end up crossing the line into arrogance. Arrogant employees are difficult to deal with, don’t take direction well and can become insubordinate. Working in this type of work environment takes its toll on employees and they once again become dissatisfied with their job and productivity levels decrease.

Learn More:

1. Aswathappa,K. (2008). Organizational Behaviour. Himalaya Publishing House, New Delhi
2. Gupta, S.K., Joshi, Rosy. (2013). Organizational Behaviour. Kalyani Publishers, New Delhi
3. Pattanayak,B.(2005). Human Resource Management,3rd Edition.Prentice Hall of India, New Delhi
4. Prasad, L.M. (2009). Organizational Behaviour. Sultan Chand & Sons, New Delhi
5. Robbins, S., Timothy.A.J.,Sanghi, S. (2009). Organizational Behaviour: Text and Cases.Pearson Prentice Hall, New Delhi
6. http://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/8-tips-for-empowering-employees.html
7. http://humanresources.about.com/od/managementandleadership/tp/empowerment.htm
8. http://humanresources.about.com/od/involvementteams/a/empowerment.htm
9. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/benefits-employee-empowerment-1177.html
10. https://hbr.org/2015/05/6-myths-about-empowering-employees