Manage-Wise

The value of employee empowerment

For a business to thrive, many diverse segments must meld together to form a cohesive and focussed organisation. The management, the employees, and the product or service all play an important part. Empowe-rment provides the opportunity for management to place many decisions and responsibilities in the hands of the employees. Empowered empl-oyees can provide streamlined service and offer solutions to customer problems that may, if not resolved, cost the business a sale and a customer.

Most companies want to increase sales and/or services by retaining current customers and acquiring new ones. Research concludes that 68 percent of the clients doing business with any one profitable company are repeat and referral customers. Research also suggests that the cost of attracting new business is five times greater than keeping current customers. If an empowered organisation imp-roves the quality of a product or service, the effects on the business can be very positive.

Management’s role

What is the management’s role in creating the best environment for employee empowerment and reaching company goals? Decisions relating to products (or services), pricing, advertising, merchandising, and hiring traditionally fall under the management’s responsibility. While policy is often determined at the top of an organisation, actual customer contact is usually found between the employees and the customer.

If a product or service is poorly designed, poorly marketed, or poorly priced, it is not likely to sell, even with 100 of the country’s best salespeople. But assuming that a desired product or service is offered and is effectively marketed and priced, having an empowered workforce lays a solid foundation for maintaining and building a strong customer base.

Six key issues for management

If the management is to forge a link between company policy, its product, and the customer, managers must build the necessary framework to ensure employee commitment to make it all work. An effective employee empowerment programme can provide that link. Empowering employees to improve product quality, to improve the speed of customer response, and to quickly resolve problems can positively affect the success of the business. For empowerment to work and to function smo-othly, the management needs to focus on six key issues.

Training: Managers must allot sufficient time to prepare new hires for their duties and tutor current employees in new products and procedures. For empowerment to work, the employee needs to understand both his or her role in the organisation and the job profile. Inadequate training puts an employee in a precarious condition and does not create a comfortable platform from which to assume decision-making responsibilities.

Motivation: Money is not the true trigger of performance. It is the management’s responsibility to motivate the workforce to perform at peek level. Managers should attempt to discover their employees’ “hot buttons” in order to create a solid work environment. For an empowerment programme to be effective, the extrinsic factors and the job environment must shape comfortable and safe surroundings, but the intrinsic factors must provide the stimulation for empowered employees to take risks in making their own decisions.

Communication: Open communication with all company employees is a key to establishing employee empo-werment programme. The opposite philosophy of “telling them only what they need to know” is dangerous and unproductive. Allowing suspicion and uncertainty to gain hold through the grapevine results in distrust.

Effective listening: If you are a manager who considers your own viewpoint as the only correct one, you will never be able to instill empowerment in your employees. Managers should stay tuned to employees. Careful consideration of what is significant to all parties is an absolute key to the company’s success. Keep in mind that hearing is not listening.

Responding: Responding quickly and following up consistently are essential skills for managers and empowered employees. Delayed decisions or slow delivery of crucial information causes frustration and anger in both customers and employees. Managers who are role models of quick response and decisive action find it easier to empower their employees to do the same.

Self-analysis: The ability to analyse your own competence and to recognise that not every action you take or decision you make will be the right one is critical to initiating an employee empowerment schedule. Capable managers in successful companies realise that constant self-analysis (informal or formal) is necessary for growth and development of a company and its employees.

Excerpt from 'Empowering Employees' by L Kristi Long. Reproduced with permission © 2005, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited.
E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com