It’s no secret. Empowered employees feel invested, engaged, and motivated to push forward, helping the company reach its goals.
But the real question remains: what techniques can you realistically use to develop an empowered workforce?
There are quite a few top considerations, from delegating responsibilities to employees, offering more opportunities for your staff to learn and grow professionally, to giving your people a voice in the direction of company or department-based goals.
If you want loyal, hard-working, and dedicated employees, you have to pay for it. It’s not just about money. It’s about time and energy.
What is Employee Empowerment?
Employee empowerment the process in which an organization gives its employees more autonomy and control over their daily work activities.
What’s the First Step?
Empowering your employees to make decisions within your company requires a certain level of trust, clear-cut communication, and strategic delegation to be done correctly.
Techniques You Should Prioritize Immediately for Results
● Communicate Clear Expectations: workers should know what to expect and what the boundaries are. Setting clear guidelines makes the entire process easier, both for you and your employees.
● Delegate Responsibility: you don’t have to do it alone; once a portion of your employees gets trained in administrative tasks, you’ll free up time to dedicate towards high-level business strategy or building the culture of your organization.
● Provide Resources: workers need the right tools at their disposal to exercise more autonomy in their work.
● Share the Company Vision: in order to feel invested in the company, you’ll have to share with them a larger vision, a goal that everyone should keep in mind.
● Recognize the Hard Work: employees that perform well should be recognized and rewarded for their contributions. One of the biggest reasons turnover exists is because workers don’t feel valued for their contributions.
Find out how your employees want to be rewarded with our employee recognition handout
● Listen to their Ideas & Input: hear them out and get some fresh perspective from employees who wish to contribute to a particular problem or bottleneck. This is where creative, out-of-the box solutions come from.
Create a Culture That Fosters Empowerment
You might have guessed, this is difficult to do on an individual level. Changes have to occur on an organizational level.
To really drive results, you’ll need to establish a stronger workplace culture that fosters core qualities like trust, collaboration, and transparency.
Creating a culture of empowerment means setting certain standards for your organization and consistently living up to them.
Although it starts with management and leadership, the entire organization has to work towards providing more autonomy and decision-making power to employees.
The changes don’t have to be huge. They can be as limited in scope as extra room in solving a particular issue in a departmental workflow.
What are Some Examples?
1. Give a Voice in the Outcome
Some business owners express skepticism when it comes to letting employees have a say in how the business is actually run.
“What if they make the wrong decisions?” Many often ask. More opinions from a different perspective often lead to better decision-making on the whole. Doing this also reduces turnover and promotes career growth opportunities.
How Great Game™ Companies Do It: Huddles (company meetings) are held so that employees from various departments can share their ideas on how to better reach goals for the coming quarter. This is where creative solutions to complex problems are generated. We also include ALL employees in the process of planning. It’s pretty difficult for employees to criticize the company’s plan when they helped create it. They’ll also be much more likely to execute on the plan if they BELIEVE in it.
2. Recognition
Providing company shout-outs, compliments, and general positive recognition to employees and department teams that perform well or meet quarterly goals is a sure way of garnering greater support and buy-in from workers.
How Great Game™ Companies Do It: Using a recognition board, we make an effort to be both specific and public with any successes employees have. We call out as many wins as we can during every Huddle in an effort to show appreciation to employees going above and beyond.
3. Education
Assist in providing employees with continuing education opportunities or educate them about the business.
Great Game of Business coaches work to take every employee and teach them the basics of financial literacy and business operations. Even entry-level line workers learn how to read a P&L statement and the basics of a company’s production or distribution work.
How Great Game™ Companies Do It: Financial literacy is taught to all employees. Workers then take this information and apply it on and off the job.
4. Autonomy
Employees feel they have control over their work decisions, which lends to feelings of freedom and openness over confinement and drudgery.
After being educated on the company’s finances and taking part in department Huddles (meetings in which company goals and measurable objectives are mapped out), a certain level of independence, dignity, and autonomy gets established.
How Great Game™ Companies Do It: Within a well-defined scope, departments are allowed to create their own strategic approach to meeting yearly and quarterly goals. We encourage departments to have their own 15-minute Huddles to review progress towards goals.
5. Rewards
Include comprehensive employee benefits. The added layer of security that comes from working for a company that is taking care of their financial needs benefits their performance on the job.
Bonus structures, employee stock options, gift cards for winning competitions & more.
How Great Game™ Companies Do It: Using unique bonus structure plans, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPS), and other reward strategies, employees feel motivated to get engaged and drive performance.
What’s the Next Step
Empower your employees with a tested, proven framework that’s over 40 years old. It all starts with a complimentary coaching call.
Join our membership program to connect with other business owners who’ve faced similar challenges.
Lastly, you can see how our methodology works live and in person at our local workshops (offered 3x a year)!
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