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:
- Abraham Wandersman, David M. Fetterman, & Shakeh J. Kaftarian. (1995). Empowerment evaluation (5th ed.).
- Cynthia D. Scott, Dennis T. Jaffe, Mary Kay Beeby, & Tony Hicks. (1991). Empowerment
- 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
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