Employee
empowerment has been described and defined in many ways but is generally
accepted as: the process of enabling an employee to think, behave, act, react
and control their work in more autonomous ways, as to be in control of one’s
own destiny.
Empowering
employees is the ongoing process of providing the tools, training, resources;
encouragement and motivation your workers need to perform at the optimum level.
If your organization is looking for a way to embrace employee empowerment focus
on these areas.
Open
Up Decision-Making
1.
Clarify extent of decision-making authority without manager approval.
2.
When leading a meeting, get everyone else’s opinion before expressing your own.
3.
Ask your team, “What do you think?” and make your question specific to the task
at hand.
4.
Eliminate approval steps where post-action monitoring and feedback will be
sufficient.
Build
Confidence
5.
Reward and recognize employees who act in an empowered way.
6.
Paint an exciting vision of the future to help employees develop their own
plans to achieve the vision.
7.
Help connect employees to other people and parts of the organization to broaden
perspective.
8.
Build up team confidence by letting them discover their own solutions and
answers, instead of telling them how to do things,
Clearly
Define Expectations
9.
Spend more time at the beginning of a project to determine its scope and goals.
10.
Ensure that each individual on your team understands what they are accountable
for.
11.
Make sure that everyone understands what part of their job is mandatory and
what they can do on their own.
12.
Set clear deadlines, but allow team members to work towards them in a way that
they are most comfortable with.
Support
Risk-Taking
13.
Do not penalize mistakes; create opportunities for individuals to share what
they’ve learned.
14.
Share problems and challenges transparently to create a sense of team unity and
support.
15.
Work together to identify and remove non-value-added or redundant work, to free
up time and energy for new endeavors.
16.
Reward employees for coming up with new approaches and solutions.
Encourage
Communication
17.
Encourage your team to take a dialogue or personality assessment, and share
results with the team.
18.
Embed time in project planning for idea sharing and feedback from the team (not
just the manager).
19.
When delivering feedback, focus on the individual’s actions, not what you
believe are the motivations for such behaviors.
20.
Instead of asking, “Does anyone have any questions?” prepare pointed questions
to ask in team meetings, to generate conversation and surface beliefs.
An
empowered workforce is something that is highly desirable in an improvement
culture. Unfortunately, just because we want it, it doesn't make it
so. Focus on these 20 areas to make a difference in your organization.
To improve the skills of the employees, we need to motivate them and empower them to perform better. Especially when we are working in a team, we must know every people have different point of view and different choice, which brings different output. So we need to empower them to perform in groups and producing good output. While following these 20 ways present here in this article, we can easily improve the performance of our team. Thanks for such a wonderful article.
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