The Sunday Mail
A few decades ago, the buzzword in human capital management was employee empowerment. It was then defined as giving employees’ autonomy to make decisions and carry out their work to get the best out of them. A lot of managers then began to step away from supervising their employees and gave them autonomy to do their work as suggested. Eventually, they were greatly disappointed. The idea of employee empowerment is that when an employee is provided with all the resources, authority, opportunity, and motivation to do their work they will become more productive.
The empowered employee is perceived as one who is powerful, confident and one who is committed to meaningful goals and demonstrates initiative. In this age, employee empowerment has come to have a different meaning, which is what we shall discuss here. As many organisations are finding, the expansion of remote work during the pandemic has created a number of problems. Mostly, management is required to ensure flawless execution of duties, seamless service delivery and happy employee. This becomes a difficult task because whole they are physically less connected with their teams, the quality of the relationship with team members is expected to be strong and productive. We all know how important face-to-face time is in relationships of all types. .
It becomes important more than ever that we understand empowerment as the concept that it must be for us to have happy and productive employees. As mentioned earlier, most managers took a hands off approach – practically telling employees that they should sink or swim in an effort to become empowered. Empowerment should be taken as an active process where a lot more mentoring and coaching is done to ensure that the team members become adaptive, learn how to make the best and most effective decisions and to use less of managements time on things that don’t really matter.
IN addition, it becomes of paramount importance to ensure that a manager knows how to empower their staff and does not opt to throw them into the deep end unnecessarily.
This approach tends to bring confusion more than empowerment to eh employee because without clear guideline or boundaries to their self-sufficiency, they become hesitant to tact an ineffectual. Asking them to figure things out by themselves actually serves the opposite, they will not be learning and so the performance is compromised. The feedback loop in the communication cycle becomes compromised because the employer is no longer communicating effectively with the employee in an effort to empower them (supposedly teaching autonomy and problem solving/ decision making to the employee) and the employee is not getting adequate feedback on their efforts to date (the manager will have no clear idea on the processes followed and the outcomes). This neglectful approach will cause employees to resort to past behavior or simply give up. This is a path that has been proven time and again to result more commonly in a fear-based response; that is the opposite of empowerment.
It is at this point that we introduce the concept of employee engagement as it is a fundamental component of the empowered employee. Employee engagement is about how an organisation strives to create working conditions which encourage the employee to offer more of their skills, capabilities and potential. It is often based on trust the employee has that the organisation wants them to succeed and is willing to provide all resource necessary for them to do so; integrity in how the employer works, two way commitment and effective communication between the employer and the employees.
Empowering employees means asking strong questions that push them to think through the problem. Rather than presenting them with a problem from your perspective and telling them to solve it…the answer will not be the correct answer. It is best to get them to identify and frame the problem and come up with the solutions. In this way, the manager’s role is to coach the employee through the strategic thinking processes and empowering them as well as giving hem ownership of their solutions. Only an engaged employee will be capable of being objective, will be willing to go through the process and will celebrate the success of having learnt a new skill and made a change in the organisation.
For everyone, evolving into an empowered employee requires a strong paradigm shift. The leaders need to be willing to coach and coax and push the employee into ta different mindset that will allow them to adapt to a new way of doing and thinking; the employee needs to believe that being a different kind of an employee is actually for their benefit and a very good thing for their career. While the world of work has been evolving, the current pandemic is expected to have a significant impact – and likely not for the better.
Negative experiences at work contribute to poor employee engagement, hence management must either mitigate against the impact of negative experiences or minimize negative experiences. Those employees that have poor experiences spread unhappiness and negativity to others. They don’t want to work, let alone be empowered and have to make decisions, no matter what you do they become toxic to the organisation. The other poorly engaged workers include those that are not psychologically attached to their work or the company and end up just putting in time and not energy or passion. These are the common clock watchers.
In order to turn this around, studies have proven that communication is a very strong tool to engage and empower employees. By sharing the vision of the organisation and coming up with an individual career path that shows the employees potential trajectory in the organisation, the employee can choose to push themselves and do their best to get to their appointed vision or choose to fall by the wayside.
Identifying an employee’s motivation issues or aspects of struggle goes a long way to empowering the employee. It becomes necessary to ask the right questions but oftentimes, as management, we fail to take this important step. Therefore we need to learn to engage and coach our team members as part of the empowerment process. I employ monthly one on one meetings to assess performance and coach on problem areas and also gain input and perspective from the employee regarding their portfolio, how they interpret their role in the organisation and how they would like to move things forward. I also use these sessions to re-align the employee actions and plans with the organisations goals and objectives. That way, as true and effective results come, the employee is further engaged and motivated. Since using this approach, I have seen a strong turn in the attitudes, engagement and performance of the team under me.
Empowering employees who don’t really want to be empowered means getting to know what motivates them, what makes them feel useful, and using that information to turn them into engaged employees. It is an excruciatingly tough battle that requires patience and resilience — until the missing pieces fall into place for that employee. Hence we always say leadership is not at all an easy task. However, once they become an empowered employee, you have helped that employee become adaptive for life. And your job managing them just became a whole lot easier.
