5 min read
Employee empowerment isn't merely a buzzword—it's a strategic approach and leadership style that recognizes the invaluable contributions and untapped potential of every individual within an organization. By empowering employees with autonomy, responsibility, and opportunities for growth, organizations not only unlock their full potential but also cultivate a company culture of trust, innovation, and collaboration with a high level of employee satisfaction.
Keep reading to learn more about what employee empowerment is, real-world strategies for your organization, and how an SOP platform encourages growth.
What is Employee Empowerment?
Empowerment is defined as the “authority or power given to someone to do something.”
Employee empowerment is a management style that allows an organization’s employees the autonomy and authority to make decisions within their positions. It involves giving employees the opportunity and freedom to solve problems, make choices, and contribute to an organization’s goals without constant supervision or micromanagement.
To make informed decisions, employees are typically given the tools and resources they need to be successful in their job. This provides the opportunity they need for growth and skills development.
Employee empowerment doesn’t always mean managers leaving an individual to fend for themself, though. Providing guidance and support when needed is still crucial for employees to feel encouraged and capable.
Benefits of Empowering Employees
- Increased job satisfaction and motivation. By providing a sense of ownership and purpose in their work, employee empowerment allows team members a more positive outlook on their job and encourages them to want to do well.
- Better decision-making. Empowerment instills a sense of ownership and accountability. This encourages employees to make decisions with a positive impact that are aligned with the organizational goals and values.
- Higher levels of productivity and innovation. Empowered employees are more likely to think creatively when exploring solutions to challenges since they are encouraged to take initiative, leading to a stronger job performance.
- Improved employee retention and loyalty. Employees want to stay where they feel a sense of belonging and fulfillment.
- Enhanced creativity. Having the autonomy to make decisions gives employees the space to think outside the box, take risks, and try new ideas without fear.
- Reduced risk. When employees are empowered to always take the right action, the organization experiences fewer serious mishaps, accidents, and liability.
Strategies for Employee Empowerment
Introducing strategies for employee empowerment helps to create a culture of engagement, accountability, and innovation. Not sure where to start? We have a few examples of how to encourage a positive work environment and unlock the potential of your employees.
Providing a foundation of knowledge with policies and procedures
Outline your company’s best practices in easily accessible policy and procedure documentation. Policies set the guidelines for behavior. Procedures are the steps. These give the employee the foundation for future decision making and innovation, all while aligning with the company culture.
Some policies and procedures you can create include:
- Code of ethics policy. This outlines the expected behavior of employees, giving an overall guideline on how one is expected to act within your organization.
- Workplace attendance policy. Employees feel empowered to proactively schedule time off and take control of their schedule in a manner that aligns with the company.
- Employee onboarding procedure. Start off on the right foot with new employees by detailing specific instructions on expectations over the first few weeks of employment.
Delegating authority and responsibility
By entrusting individuals with decision-making power and assigning them meaningful responsibilities, leaders demonstrate their confidence in their employees' abilities and create opportunities for growth and development. Instead of micro-management, why not give your employees tools to help themselves?
A few examples of delegating authority and responsibility include:
- Encouraging project leadership. Assigning top talent as a team leader to oversee a project, offering the authority to make decisions to complete the task.
- Offering customer care authority. Providing front-line retail or customer service employees with the decision-making authority to offer discounts or issue refunds.
- Allowing employee-led initiatives. Encourage employees to lead initiatives outside their core responsibilities, such as organizing team-building activities or driving process improvements.
Encouraging innovation and creativity
Creating a safe space for experimentation and welcoming new ideas and perspectives helps to empower employees to think outside the box. Recognizing and celebrating these ideas, achievements, and hard work helps individuals feel valued and drives motivation for positive change.
Employers can encourage innovation and creativity by:
- Establishing open communication channels. Set aside time for employees to be heard and bring new ideas and innovative solutions to the table, either through brainstorming sessions or a suggestion box.
- Encouraging cross-functional collaboration. By bringing different teams together on a project, you’ll have a broader range of ideas and perspectives.
- Allocating time for creativity. Employers can set aside specific time for creative thinking, either through “innovation days” or setting aside some time every few weeks for projects outside of primary responsibilities.
Offering opportunities for skill development
By investing time and money in your employees through training, employers encourage their workforce to expand their knowledge and expertise and empower them to grow in their skills.
A few ideas of learning opportunities include:
- Training programs and workshops. Whether in-person or self-directed, training programs and workshops can help empower employees by expanding their skills. One example of this is attending a yearly industry learning conference.
- Mentorship and coaching initiatives. Upper-level management can offer personalized guidance and support to individuals as they navigate their professional growth journeys. A weekly coffee chat with an executive is one example of this.
- Cross-functional projects and job rotations. Upskilling and reskilling within an organization is an impactful way to expand employee skills while staying relevant to the job. An example of this is sending an employee to shadow a coworker in a different division for a day to learn what their function is within the company.
How Can an SOP Platform Help Encourage Employee Empowerment?
When it comes to offering tools and resources within your organization to encourage a culture of empowerment, an SOP (standard operating procedure) platform is a powerful example. SOP platforms provide centralized access to information, the elimination of knowledge silos, an opportunity for self-directed learning, and a mechanism for employee feedback.
Centralized access to information
Your SOP platform should be the central point of knowledge sharing within your organization. SOPs provide employees with clear expectations, guidelines, and best practices for performing in their roles. By empowering employees with readily available resources, they can make informed decisions based on your company's "best ways" and take ownership of their work.
Elimination of knowledge silos
By documenting cross-functional processes and breaking them down into detailed procedures and responsibilities, people can understand the big picture and see how they fit in. Further, when employees understand why they are performing a task and its importance, they are more apt to do it and do it correctly.
Self-directed learning
Employees can proactively seek out information and enhance their skills at their own pace with professional development. With an increase in knowledge, employees feel empowered to make their own decisions. Your SOP platform should have the capability for linking to learning materials including interactive tutorials, videos, images, and quizzes.
Feedback mechanism
SOP platforms are especially useful in feedback surveys and engagement metrics when encouraging employee empowerment. Feedback surveys built into your SOP platform allow employees the opportunity to voice their opinion, which is woven into their daily tasks. Employee engagement metrics allow people managers the ability to see where employees spend their time in SOPs and where they may need help.
Measuring the Impact of Employee Empowerment
Employee empowerment is vital to a company's health, and it’s important to measure the impact made on organizational success. Measuring the impact can help assess the effectiveness of employee empowerment, identify areas of improvement, and make informed decisions. There are two primary ways to measure the impact – key performance indicators (KPIs) and employee surveys/engagement metrics.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) for evaluating empowerment initiatives can include a look into employee productivity, customer satisfaction scores, sales performance, and quality of work.
Employee feedback surveys and engagement metrics are most likely your most reliable indicators that employees feel empowered within your organization and have greater job satisfaction. While this is a more qualitative approach to measuring the impact, gathering feedback from employees on their perception of employee empowerment within your organization can uncover successes, challenges, and areas of improvement.
Your SOP platform should include features that allow the measurement of employee empowerment. A few examples of features include checklists, which can show the completion of tasks and can help uncover analysis into employee productivity. Feedback forms allow employees the autonomy to offer clear communication into their perspectives on different processes within your organization.
Using Zavanta Can Help Facilitate Employee Empowerment
Zavanta is an SOP software solution that can help encourage an empowered workforce.
The platform offers a superior user experience and includes user-friendly features like testing and quizzes, feedback surveys, usage analytics, and more. The employee portal links all knowledge assets together and gives a diverse audience a variety of navigation paths and fast access to information from any device. With Zavanta, you can give employees how-to information at the moment they need it by inserting links to relevant SOPs directly into work.
Your employees have fast, easy access to organizational knowledge and policies and procedures.
Contact our team today to learn more.
Additional Resources:
