Employee Empowerment?

An organization’s human resource is its most valuable asset. The employees are the repository of
knowledge, skills and abilities that can’t be imitated by the competitors. Technologies, products
and processes are easily imitated by the competitors; however, at the end of the day, employees
are the most strategic resource of the company.

Generally, people are a firm’s most underutilized resource. And that is why management tries to
empower the employees. But employees often are afraid of taking this responsibility. They fear
the additional work pressure that they will have to bear as a part of being empowered. Besides,
they also fear being held accountable for the decisions they make.

For employee empowerment to work successfully, the management team must be truly
committed to allowing employees to make decisions. They may wish to define the scope of
decisions made. Building decision-making teams is often one of the models used in employee
empowerment, because it allows for managers and workers to contribute ideas toward directing
the company.

Autocratic managers, who are micromanagers, tend not to be able to utilize employee
empowerment. These types of managers tend to oversee all aspects of others’ work, and usually
will not give up control. A manager dedicated to employee empowerment must be willing to give
up control of some aspects of work production.

When employees feel as though they have choice and can make direct decisions, this does often
lead to a greater feeling of self-worth. In a model where power is closely tied to sense of self,
having some power is a valuable thing. An employee who does not feel constantly watched and
criticized is more likely to consider work as a positive environment, rather than a negative one.

One easy way to begin employee empowerment in the workplace is to install a suggestion box,
where workers can make suggestions without fear of punishment or retribution. However, simply
placing a suggestion box somewhere is only the first step. Managers must then be willing to read
and consider suggestions. They might provide a forum where questions or suggestions receive a
response, like a weekly or monthly newsletter. In addition, managers can hold a once monthly
meeting open to employees where all suggestions are addressed.

By Priti Shah
Laurent & Benon Management Consultants Ltd, a public limited company with its corporate
office Gurgaon with Pan-India presence. We as an organization strive to offer the right Human
Resource Solutions at the right time and enable our clients to enhance the net worth of their
human resource capital.

People Power
People as your most important asset. Your technologies, products and structures can be copied by competitors.
No one, however, can match your highly charged, motivated people who care. People are
your firm's repository of knowledge and they are central to your company's competitive
advantage.
Empower people around you. Well educated, coached, and highly motivated people are critical to the development and
execution of strategies, especially in today's faster-paced, more perplexing world, where top management alone can no longer
assure your firm's competitiveness.

Balanced Organization: 5 Basic Elements

Empowered Employees (Metal):
• People are sharply aligned with corporate vision and strategies... More

Why Employee Empowerment?

People are your firm's most underutilized resource. In the new knowledge economy, independent entrepreneurship and
initiative is needed throughout the ranks of your organization. Involvement in an organization is no longer a one-
way street. In today's corporate environment a manager must work towards engaging organization forcefully
enough to achieve its objectives. New knowledge-based enterprises are characterized by flat hierarchical structures
and multi-skilled workforce. Managers assume more leadership and coaching tasks and work hard to provide
employees with resources and working conditions they need to accomplish the goals they've agreed to. In brief,
managers work for their staff, and not the reverse.
Empowerment is the oil that lubricates the exercise of learning. Talented and empowered human capital is
becoming the prime ingredient of organizational success. A critical feature of successful teams, especially in
knowledge-based enterprises, is that they are invested with a significant degree of empowerment, or decision-
making authority.
Equally important, employee empowerment changes the managers' mind-set and leaves them with more time to
engage in broad-based thinking, visioning, and nurturing. This intelligent and productive division of duties between
visionary leaders, focusing on emerging opportunities, and empowered employees, running the business unit day
to day (with oversight on the leader's part) provides for a well-managed enterprise with strong growth potential.

18 Leadership Lessons from Colin Powell

• Never neglect details. When everyone's mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant. Good
leaders delegate and empower others liberally, but they pay attention to details, every day. The job of the
leader is not to be the chief organizer, but the chief disorganizer.".... More

The Leader Is Best, When...

By: Lao Tzu
The leader is best,...
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
The people say, 'We did it ourselves.'... More

Quick and Easy Kaizen

Quick and Easy Kaizen empowers employees, enriches the work experience and brings out the best in
every person. It Improves quality, safety, cost structures, delivery, environments, throughput and
customer service... More
7 Principles of Toyota Production System (TPS)
3. Employee involvement and empowerment... More

Case in Point Canon Production System (CPS)

The Canon Production System (CPS) includes:
• Staff participation (quality circles, suggestion boxes, improvement proposals), and workshop
dynamism... More

Three Stages of the Suggestion System

1. Encouragement. In the first stage, management should make every effort to help the workers provide
suggestions, no matter how primitive, for the betterment of the worker's job and the workshop. This will help the
workers look at the way they are doing their jobs... More

Implementing Kaizen: 7 Conditions

Case in Point 14 TQM Slogans at Pentel
 Pentel is a Japanese firm manufacturing stationary products. The following is a list of 14 Pentel's slogans for
explaining Total Quality Management (TQM) and Quick and Easy Kaizen philosophy to its employees.
• You are surrounded by mountains of treasures... More

Empowerment through Coaching

The new breed of leaders recognizes that in today's complex business environment autocracy no longer works, yet
the empowerment alone is not enough. Coaching aims to enhance the learning ability and performance of others.
"It involves providing feedback, but also uses other techniques such as motivation,
effective questioning and consciously matching your management style
to the player's readiness to undertake a particular task. It is based on helping the player to help her/himself through
interacting dynamically with her/him - it does not rely on a one-way flow of telling and instructing."5...More

Leadership-Management Synergy
Keep People In The Know
"Transformational leaders empower others by keeping them "in the know," by keeping them fully informed on
everything that effects their jobs," says Brian Tracy.
"People want and need to feel that they are “insiders,” that they are aware of everything that is going on. There is
nothing so demoralizing to a staff member than to be kept in the dark about their work and what is going on in the
company."... More

Empowering the People Around You: 3 General Rules

The three general rules for empowering the people around you, which apply to everyone you meet, are
appreciation, approval, and attention. Voice your thanks and gratitude to others on every occasion. Praise them for
every accomplishment. And pay close attention to them when they talk and want to interact with you. These three
behaviors alone will make you a master of human interaction and will greatly empower the people around you...
More

Case in Point Jack Welch and GE

Some years ago, in locations throughout GE, local managers were operating in an insulated environment with
Chinese walls separating them, both horizontally and vertically, from other departments and their workforce.
Employee questions, initiatives, and feedback were discouraged.
In the new knowledge-driven economy, Jack Welch, CEO, GE, "viewed this as anathema. He believed in creating
an open collaborative workplace where everyone's opinion was welcome."3 He wrote in a letter to shareholders: "If
you want to get the benefit of everything employees have, you've got to free them – make everybody a participant.
Everybody has to know everything, so they can make the right decisions by themselves."

Empowerment
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For the piece of public art, see Empowerment (sculpture). For the Tibetan Buddhist practice, see
Empowerment (Tibetan Buddhism).
Look up empowerment in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Empowerment refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social, or economic strength of

individuals and communities. It often involves the empowered developing confidence in their
own capacities.
Contents
[hide]

• 1 Definitions
• 2 Marginalization and empowerment
• 3 The process of empowerment
• 4 Workplace empowerment
• 5 Economics and empowerment
• 6 References
• 7 Notes

• 8 See also

[edit] Definitions
The term empowerment covers a vast landscape of meanings, interpretations, definitions and
disciplines ranging from psychology and philosophy to the highly commercialized self-help
industry and motivational sciences.

Sociological empowerment often addresses members of groups that social discrimination

processes have excluded from decision-making processes through - for example - discrimination
based on disability, race, ethnicity, religion, or gender. Empowerment as a methodology is often
associated with feminism: see consciousness-raising.

[edit] Marginalization and empowerment

This article does not cite any references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be
challenged and removed. (July 2007)

"Marginalized" refers to the overt or covert trends within societies whereby those perceived as
lacking desirable traits or deviating from the group norms tend to be excluded by wider society
and ostracised as undesirables.

Sometimes groups are marginalized by society at large, but governments are often unwitting or
enthusiastic participants. For example, the U.S. government marginalized cultural minorities,
particularly blacks, prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This Act made it illegal to restrict
access to schools and public places based on race. Equal opportunity laws which actively oppose
such marginalization, allow increased empowerment to occur. They are also a symptom of
minorities' and women's empowerment through lobbying.

Marginalized people who have no opportunities for self-sufficiency become, at a minimum,

dependent on charity or welfare. They lose their self-confidence because they cannot be fully
self-supporting. The opportunities denied them also deprive them of the pride of accomplishment
which others, who have those opportunities, can develop for themselves. This in turn can lead to
psychological, social and even mental health problems.

Empowerment is then the process of obtaining these basic opportunities for marginalized people,
either directly by those people, or through the help of non-marginalized others who share their
own access to these opportunities. It also includes actively thwarting attempts to deny those
opportunities. Empowerment also includes encouraging, and developing the skills for, self-
sufficiency, with a focus on eliminating the future need for charity or welfare in the individuals
of the group. This process can be difficult to start and to implement effectively, but there are
many examples of empowerment projects which have succeeded.[citation needed]

One empowerment strategy is to assist marginalized people to create their own nonprofit
organization, using the rationale that only the marginalized people, themselves, can know what
their own people need most, and that control of the organization by outsiders can actually help to
further entrench marginalization. Charitable organizations lead from outside of the community,
for example, can disempower the community by entrenching a dependence on charity or welfare.
A nonprofit organization can target strategies that cause structural changes, reducing the need for
ongoing dependence. Red Cross, for example, can focus on improving the health of indigenous
people, but does not have authority in its charter to install water-delivery and purification
systems, even though the lack of such a system profoundly, directly and negatively impacts
health. A nonprofit composed of the indigenous people, however, could insure their own
organization does have such authority and could set their own agendas, make their own plans,
seek the needed resources, do as much of the work as they can, and take responsibility - and
credit - for the success of their projects (or the consequences, should they fail).

Numerous critical perspectives exist that propose that an empowerment paradigm is present,
Clark (2008) showed that whilst there was a degree of autonomy provided by empowerment, it
also made way for extended surveillance and control, hence the contradiction perspective
(Fardini, 2001).

[edit] The process of empowerment

The process which enables individuals/groups to fully access personal/collective power,
authority and influence, and to employ that strength when engaging with other people,
institutions or society.

In other words, “Empowerment is not giving people power, people already have plenty of power,
in the wealth of their knowledge and motivation, to do their jobs magnificently We define
empowerment as letting this power out (Blanchard, K)." It encourages people to gain the skills
and knowledge that will allow them to overcome obstacles in life or work environment and
ultimately, help them develop within themselves or in the society.

Empowerment includes the following, or similar, capabilities:-

• The ability to make decisions about personal/collective circumstances

• The ability to access information and resources for decision-making
 • Ability to consider a range of options from which to choose (not just yes/no, either/or.)
• Ability to exercise assertiveness in collective decision making
• Having positive-thinking about the ability to make change
• Ability to learn and access skills for improving personal/collective circumstance.
• Ability to inform others’ perceptions though exchange, education and engagement.
• Involving in the growth process and changes that is never ending and self-initiated
• Increasing one's positive self-image and overcoming stigma
• Increasing one's ability in discreet thinking to sort out right and wrong

[edit] Workplace empowerment

One account of the history of workplace empowerment in the United States recalls the clash of
management styles in railroad construction in the American West in the mid-19th century, where
"traditional" hierarchical East-Coast models of control encountered individualistic pioneer
workers, strongly supplemented by methods of efficiency-oriented "worker responsibility"
brought to the scene by Chinese laborers. In this case, empowerment at the level of work teams
or brigades achieved a notable (but short-lived) demonstrated superiority[1]

Empowerment in the workplace is regarded by critics as more a pseudo-empowerment exercise,

the idea of which is to change the attitudes of workers, so as to make them work harder rather
than giving them any real power, and Wilkinson (1998) refers to this as "attitudinal shaping".
However, recent research suggests that the opportunity to exercise personal discretion/choice
(and complete meaningful work) is an important element contributing to employee engagement
and well-being. There is evidence [2] that initiative and motivation are increased when people
have a more positive attributional style. This influences self-belief, resilience when faced with
setbacks, and the ability to visualize oneself overcoming problems. The implication is that
'empowerment' suits some more than others, and should be positioned in the broader and wider
context of an 'enabling' work environment.

Empowerment to employees in the work place provides them with opportunities penda to make
their own decisions with regards to their tasks. Now-a-days more and more bosses and managers
are practicing the concept of empowerment among their subordinates to provide them with better
opportunities.

In Management:

In the book Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute, the authors, Ken Blanchard, John P.
Carlos, and Alan Randolph, illustrate three simple keys that organizations can use to effectively
open the knowledge, experience, and motivation power that people already have. The three keys
are that managers must use to empower their employees are: share information with everyone,
create autonomy through boundaries and replace the old hierarchy with self-managed teams.

Share information with everyone – this is the first key to empowering people within an
organization. By sharing information with everyone, you are giving them a clear picture of the
company and its current situation. Another strong point that this brings is trust; by allowing all of
the employees to view the company information, it helps to build that trust between employer
and employee. Create autonomy through boundaries – this is the second key to empowerment
which also builds upon the previous one. By opening communication through sharing
information, it opens up the feedback about what is holding them back from being empowered.
Replace the old hierarchy with self-managed teams – this is the third and final key to
empowerment which ties them all together. By replacing the old hierarchy with self-managed
teams, more responsibility is placed upon unique and self-managed teams which create better
communication and productivity. [3]

[edit] Economics and empowerment

In economic development, the empowerment approach focuses on mobilizing the self-help
efforts of the poor, rather than providing them with social welfare. Economic empowerment is
also the empowering of previously disadvantaged sections of the population, for example, in
many previously colonized African countries[4].