3 Tips for Encouraging Employee Empowerment

Trying to micromanage every single employee in a business is a difficult task that may quickly drain your energy. This is why it may be important to encourage your workers to perform tasks without the guidance or instructions of their manager. Once the wheels start turning and employees begin to perform many tasks on their own, the entire business will begin to run more smoothly. Now the real question is – how do you actually encourage your employees to take initiative in the business? How one can properly empower his workers? Below are discussed tips and tricks how to encourage your employees to take a further step and perform some tasks on their own. Encourage employee involvement in common tasks Encouraging people to join, share and speak is a critical component of an effective empowerment culture. It is a fact that most people do not really like being told what to do. Even though most of us have jobs with responsibilities and duties defined by someone else, effectively and gently being told up front what to do, we like to believe we actually have some freedom and free choices to define our roles as we see fit. In recognizing this human tendency, you come to the conclusion that your employees will gain better results if you engage them and give them a degree of freedom. Give tangible gifts and long-lasting rewards Most people feel appreciated when others gift them. You can empower your employees and co-workers by giving them a kind of gift that would be personally both meaningful and surprising to each person you want to encourage. It might not be an easy task as you have to get to know what kind of items the people who work with you value and appreciate the most. You can choose to give your employees some time off work or giving them some extra vacation days. You can also reinforce some of your employees. One form of positive reinforcement is, for example, an employee-of-the-month program. Doing so is a small but effective way to say “thank you” to your employees for everything they have accomplished in the previous month. Even more, by rewarding employees for excellence, they will naturally want to continue pushing themselves on the job. Taking risks is critical to a culture of innovation Innovation can be a company’s best strategic advance, especially in today’s competitive and crowded marketplace. However, for the innovation to occur, most companies have to be willing to embrace the risk of potential failure. Actually, this kind of an approach across the company always has to start with the tone at the top – if employees see their manager taking risks and testing new ideas, they are more likely to follow suit. As ideas cannot be shared without honest and open communication, encourage your employees to say a thing or two about company’s latest projects. Communication always takes time, so adequate time and place for discussion and meetings must be apportioned into the normal schedule. Finally, it is important to mention that empowerment is a powerful tool for managers – but only a smart manager knows how and when empowerment works best. In other words, proper empowerment can gain dramatically better results and a higher level of employee engagement with the corporate mission.