What is employee empowerment?
Employee empowerment can be defined as a management style that gives all employees the freedom, resources, and support to take responsibility for their work, make independent decisions, and contribute to the company's success with their skills and strengths. This means creating an environment where employees feel valued, heard and empowered to make positive changes in their careers.
Accordingly, employee empowerment can manifest itself in many forms – from trusting employees in making important decisions to providing them with the resources necessary for the best comfortable work.
Why is employee empowerment important?
Employee empowerment is important for a number of reasons. Here are the most important among them:
Increased productivity
Employees who have more opportunities tend to work more efficiently. They can use their skills and knowledge to solve complex tasks and achieve better results.
Employee satisfaction
Providing employees with opportunities for development and professional growth can increase their job satisfaction. Satisfied employees often stay with the company longer and can be more motivated and committed to their work.
Competitiveness of the company
Companies that provide development opportunities for their employees can attract and retain talented employees. This helps to increase the competitiveness of the company in the market.
Innovations
Empowering employees can stimulate the creation of new ideas and innovations in the company. When employees have the opportunity to experiment and develop new approaches, it can lead to new products, services, or process improvements.
Leadership development
Providing opportunities for professional growth helps the company identify and develop its future leaders. This is especially important to ensure the sustainable development of the company in the future.
Improving the quality of work
Professional development and training help employees improve their skills and competencies. This can lead to an increase in the quality of performed tasks and services, which contributes to the satisfaction of the company's customers and partners.
4 ways how to boost employee empowerment in the workplace
- Give projects, not tasks
To boost creativity and innovation, you need to make space for it. A common way of doing that is to give employees ownership of their responsibilities and allow them to personally determine how to approach a challenge at hand.
By letting employees make decisions, they become more engaged with their work and more invested in the results they produce.
- Encourage innovation by rewarding performance
While it’s great to be trusted to do things your way, people often get disenchanted if the improved results aren’t recognized. Hence, to keep employees engaged, it’s crucial to recognize and reward success.
This doesn’t necessarily mean giving a monetary bonus or complex salary schemes, although those can certainly be strong motivators. Showing public appreciation and not punishing effective workers with more work are a good place to start.
- Give employees control of their time
Flexible work schedules boost not only morale, but productivity, too. Different people peak at different hours of the day and being able to work when it is most convenient can go a long way in boosting team empowerment.
Today, with tools like Yaware.TimeTracker, teams worldwide are giving their employees control over their time and seeing productivity improvements. Not only can employees work more flexibly, while still being accountable for their time, but they can also identify bad habits and optimize their own working patterns.
Yaware.TimeTracker is a simple and convenient tool for teams of all sizes and structures, designed specifically to improve productivity.
With its help, you can find out:
- what time of the day is the most productive for employees
- what resources employees use to perform a specific task
- how much time is spent on a task
- when difficulties arise in the performance of a task and help is needed
- what distracts employees and prevents them from moving forward
Want to start using Yaware.TimeTracker? Sign up now.
What's more, Yaware offers 14 days of free use of the program so you can experience its functionality to the fullest!
- Establish a way to get honest feedback – both ways
Repeatedly seek input from workers, discuss challenges, brainstorm solutions – when employees see that their opinions matter, they’ll be far more engaged and feel more empowered to voice their ideas.
In general, employee expansion opportunities lead to improved work quality, attracting talented employees and increasing the company's competitiveness to maintain the market.
