Feeling empowered and being empowered gives us a great deal of confidence, and a sense of purpose and value in our careers. What can be difficult though, is transferring empowerment into something tangible.
Because empowerment might mean different things for different employees, or take a range of steps to initiate, it can also be hard for senior management to justify the time and expense this may take to action. However, the benefits of empowering employees often far outweigh that of the investment.
Particularly in today’s climate, employees are feeling uncertain in their roles. Having absolute empowerment starts with some basic steps and can progress with further nurturing, all of which we will explore in this article.
Knowing the role, understanding expectations
If you asked your team to write down an exhaustive list of their responsibilities and duties, could they do it? Often when we progress in a role we end up taking on more and more until the lines become blurred.
Having a definitive job description, including who to report to for what, from day one will help your team know exactly what they should be doing, avoid confusion and give your employees the confidence to deliver. If a role evolves, ensure your employees get updated digital job descriptions to ensure absolute clarity.
Allowing for growth through mistakes
Though mistakes in the workplace can cause a lot of additional pressure, stress and tension, it’s the way in which they’re dealt with that determines whether they can help or hinder an organisation. If training and CPD have been lax, you will have to expect mistakes to happen at one point or another.
What’s important is that, once identified, a de-brief takes place. From this debrief you can create a plan of action, or introduce a new process to prevent this from occurring again. In doing so, you tighten processes, and your team members learn a valuable lesson. Your team also gets used to the debriefing sessions, and could use this method to problem solve with their own workload.
Providing the opportunity to upskill
When an employee’s knowledge becomes stale or outdated, it can leave your company exposed to a substandard pool of information, and greatly misrepresent what your brand signifies. There are a few ways you can ensure people stay developed:
- Provide a training allowance for online courses, books and other materials
- Introduce regular CPD sessions, either individually or for whole teams
- Encourage self-development hours once or twice a month, they can use this time freely to explore subjects they feel will help them with their career and put together a short slide deck or document in order to share with others
Investing in an employee’s development is good for business whichever way you look at it. For example, the employee feels they are valued and progressing their career, and your organisation benefits from a new skill. The only negative in the financial commitment is if somebody leaves, they take this skill with them. Ensure that any person bringing these new skills into the business are documenting any new processes or knowledge so this can be used for training further down the line.
Likewise, if you’re going to make a considerable financial investment (such as for a degree), ensure there are terms surrounding this – for example the employee would have to pay back the cost of the qualification if they leave within a certain amount of years.
Investing in tools and processes that streamline
Work smarter, not harder. An employee shouldn’t need to be constantly running around stressed to showcase how hard they work. Aside from stress having a negative impact on workplace culture and general happiness, things that can make life easier for employees will make them more productive and free up time from monotonous tasks for more strategic or creative thinking.
What you get…
Giving people the ability to make decisions means they are accountable
With responsibility comes accountability. When an employee is empowered to make decisions for themselves, they understand that the pressure falls on their shoulders, and will usually do all they can to avoid any failures.
Quicker problem solving
When the right individuals have their positions elevated, they feel more confident to make contributions to higher-level conversations.
Better job satisfaction
When people feel they are trusted and their opinions are valued, they generally have a better experience in the workplace and a more positive perception. Those that are happy may evangelise to others, either through word of mouth or through advocacy on social media. This helps strengthen your employer brand and recruiting prospects.
More stringent processes, less room for error
Giving someone a new responsibility or training is usually coupled with new processes, systems or tools. This means looking at an area of a business that may have been previously unexplored, and provides an opportunity to tighten the workflows within an organisation.
Employees are more aligned with the organisation’s goals
Being empowered in the workplace makes people feel more emotionally invested in a company. When they feel part of the conversation and valued as a colleague, they are buying into the brand, the business and the ethos the company holds.
Empowering employees doesn’t mean giving inflated responsibility for the sake of it. It’s much more about identifying opportunities to enhance the working lives of promising team members.
By doing this, in turn you create a much more rewarding place to work and a more efficient, streamlined workforce.
Global brands across the world are empowering employees by giving them the freedom to create through BAM by Papirfly™. The all-in-one brand activation management tool gives teams the ability to:
- Create an infinite amount of assets to support your marketing and with easy-to-use design software. Give employees complete autonomy to create professional brochures, videos, emails, social media assets and more without any design skills needed.
- Adapt campaign materials, text and imagery for use in markets across the globe in just minutes.
- Organise, filter and store every campaign asset in your collection. Logos, fonts, imagery, videos and more can be found, downloaded, shared and modified by teams across the world.
- Share and distribute guidelines, training videos company-wide to keep everyone on the same page.
Find out more about BAM today or get in touch for a demo with one of our expert team.