Empowerment

This post of mine highlights the need of empowerment in the world of today. Empowerment in a broad extent today means providing individuals with potency in terms of authority and involvement in various aspects to help them become brave, and attain freedom to self determine the good practice. It is generally focused on providing opportunity to build self confidence in oneself to progress in life.

Employee empowerment is practiced back from the old times of the industrial revolution in the United States when the concept of employee was gradually changing as in effect to how the Chinese workers at that time use to perform and follow the “worker responsibility” policy effectively i.e. the authority to work decisively and correctly.

In this highly corporate world of today, employee empowerment is considered the key to organizational success. It is a relation essential for both managers and employees in order to work effectively and efficiently side by side, along with maximizing long term goals for the organization. In addition to that, employee empowerment in the long run helps retain the most excellent employees, internally motivated to work for the organization.

Organizations today strive to maintain a balance between empowerment of employees and management control. Rules are followed to allow employees to remain strong, along with helping the management to establish its control in terms of supervision of tasks. This is essential because every individual should be allowed to work in an environment that is less stressful and more adaptive. For example, workers at Intel Corporation are delegated work in order to achieve better results. The employees are allowed to set in their own objectives and achieve them so that they get an opportunity to experience leadership.

In order to strike a balance, it is essential that the managers and employees have good faith in each other and maintain a working relationship that is beneficial to them and the organization. A model specific set of strategies should be followed to maintain the working relationship properly.

The first ideal rule to follow is that management should make a consistent and result oriented objective to be followed. It should be specific and time oriented. Next, managers should organize groups or teams to carry out the assigned objectives. It is now the motivation factor that plays its role in energizing and helping achieve the desired goal. Being a positive helpful manager would be an added advantage for the employee personal development. Communication in this case plays a very important role; managers should be very cooperative and should deal with every matter with value. Trust is also a very important factor; it is this relationship that eventually leads to cooperation and balance.

Subsequently follows the evaluation where employee work is evaluated. It is suggested that managers try to evaluate their employees on factors that are measurable and in the vicinity of the employees’ control. Factors that are uncontrollable should be avoided because it would make the judgment bias. Lastly, the whole process leads to personal experience to how one knows himself better. A SWOT analysis measuring key strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for personal development is important. This in return helps an individual both managers and employees to judge themselves in order to find room for improvements. Managers also at times reward employees with benefits which is also tool to appreciate better performance. This would in the end result in empowerment both personally and professionally.


References:

1. Abraham Wandersman, David M. Fetterman, & Shakeh J. Kaftarian. (1995). Empowerment evaluation (5th ed.).
   
2. Cynthia D. Scott, Dennis T. Jaffe, Mary Kay Beeby, & Tony Hicks. (1991). Empowerment
   
3. Management by Objectives. From: 1000ventures (Website)

Moiz Damani is currently a student at Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology, pursuing an MBA degree with specialization in Finance

Great Ideas: How to track employee performance

This post is basically a gist of the points mentioned in the article published in an online website that discusses some facts managers should look into: a summary of some of the essential points for managers who ought to judge their employee performances.

First and foremost, the author suggests that targets should not be set got long term goals; it should be set for a rather smaller period such as on a quarterly basis rather than yearly. This makes it easier for managers to judge employee performance in a better and sound manner.

Secondly, the author asks managers not to use too much mathematics for performance check. A simple and rather straightforward method might be more beneficial and rather easy both for the manager and for the employee to cope up with.

Thirdly, help in any form from other should be fully appreciated and counted in for judging performance. The author in this case points out that not every manager is perfect and help is indeed an option. This would in the end be helpful as new ideas would pour in which would make the measurement more credible and help resolve a difficult task.

Fourthly, for performance to be judged effectively, managers should not take into account factors that are not in control by the employees.

Lastly, providing freedom to analyze an employee’s performance by oneself would be more helpful in correcting the failures/problems of the past. This is indeed a very helpful step for every employee in judging his own performance rationally and dealing it in the long run.

The article mainly informs managers and those who read about some of the most intelligent steps that managers should take in this corporate world to overcome performance management problems that are being faced. It acts as a checklist for both managers and employees about how to judge and how one should work in effectively in a corporate world to ensure progress.

Source: Canadianbusiness Entrepreneur (Human Resource) Section (Website)

Moiz Damani is currently a student at Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology, pursuing an MBA degree with specialization in Finance.