Why Employee Empowerment is Important

Employee empowerment can be characterized in many ways. Empowering employees gives them the freedom to make decisions to some degree in their daily work. It’s about letting them decide how to get their desired end result. Employee empowerment is about the trust and accountability that you give your employees to make their own path of success. It creates a better and healthy working environment for employees, which benefits the company’s overall productivity in return.

The Benefits of Employee Empowerment

When you empower your employees to make their own decisions and choose how to handle issues for ultimate success, they become more loyal, committed and productive to their job and to the company. There are endless benefits of giving employees the right to lead and work toward their goals in their own way. With this freedom, they will often brainstorm various strategies to reach their goals without feeling bound to specific rules or processes. They will appreciate the trust given to them and aim to succeed and gain even more trust from their employer.

Empowered employees are more likely to:

• Be more productive: When employees are empowered, they feel that their decisions are contributing to the overall success of the company, making them more productive in their day to day tasks.
• Go the extra mile: When employees feel empowered, they will often take the initiative to make the company more successful.
• Have a “Positive” attitude: When people are trusted, they develop a positive attitude to handle situations in an appropriate manner.
• Follow best practices: When they are credited for contributions, employees aim to adopt best practices to achieve even more improvements.
• Have good communication: They begin to improve communications within the company, which creates a healthy and peaceful working environment, which positively affects overall production of the organization.

Employee empowerment helps you by:

• Increased productivity

As a higher quality and focused approach takes hold, confidence grows in an organization. The productivity increases and the individual responsible for their work becomes the pioneers of the process. Time is spent more efficiently for the benefits of the company.

• Reduced production costs

Turnovers decrease as empowered employees are satisfied with their jobs. The experience stays in-house and operations become more beneficial, with productivity rising within the company.

• High level of internal cooperation and motivation

Empowered employees feel confident about their work, which leads them to take initiative to cooperate with other employees. As they are appreciated for the work they do, they try to improve it even more by helping others. This internal cooperation plays a vital role in the progress of the firm.

• Collaboration Grows

In an environment where employees are empowered, they feel confident about their work, inspiring them to share ideas and strategies. This fosters teamwork, which is beneficial to overall company growth and health.

• Increased quality

When given credit and authority, employees can also make a difference in the quality of work produced. Their achievements and goals become a matter of personal pride. When the quality of the work is improved, this directly benefits both client and company.

Benefits for the Leader/Manager

If you’re a manager of an empowered team, you will gain many benefits such as:

• Your people will be cooperative and will have a sense of internal collaboration.
• They will bring change to the company to create other opportunities, and will also be welcoming toward the changes being adopted.
• Creativity will increase.
• Employees will be keen to implement their skills and knowledge in various strategies to increase productivity and reduce cost.
• They will be eager to contribute in the decision-making processes to aid in improvements for the quality of your performance.
• There will be an increase in their loyalty and honesty, and they won’t hesitate to speak up when needed for the benefit of the company.
• They will be keen in analyzing errors in the system and attempting to fix them.

The significance of empowering employees in the work environment should not be underestimated. Empowerment breeds individual and group productivity. When individuals are confident with their work and their manager, they are more willing to recognize issues and recommend approaches to enhance quantity and quality of successful outcomes. The culture of empowerment can kick off great change with positive and lasting effects in an organization.