Employee Surveys = Involvement and Empowerment

Ongoing customer satisfaction is a result of a focused and well-managed process for continuous improvement. Design your products and services to meet or exceed customer expectations, and you'll enhance your ability to grow your market share. Design the processes that provide those products and services to be performed in the most effective, efficient, reliable, and consistent manner possible, and you’ll enhance your ability to meet your organizational strategies. Proactively involve and empower your people in the previously mentioned steps, and you have the elements for gaining and sustaining long-term competitive advantage.

Even in organizations where there is a demonstrated understanding of this logic, many efforts to succeed in implementing strategies to achieve a more empowered workforce fail. Many times, this failure can be attributed to a lack of understanding regarding the nature of empowerment and the four basic elements required for successful implementation.

Involvement and Empowerment

One of the foundational principles of continuous improvement is “respect for employees demonstrated by employee involvement and empowerment.” The goal of this principle is respect. It involves genuine respect and the understanding that employees have the ability, based on their knowledge and experience, to add value to the organization’s success. While most organizational leaders intellectually and emotionally buy-in to this principle, the positive results of involvement and empowerment are sometimes elusive. To help understand why this occurs, let’s look at how the words “involvement” and “empowerment” are defined and used in a business environment.

Involvement is the ongoing process of informing employees and gathering input from them. This process results in a workforce that continuously thinks of ways to improve performance and acts in a manner consistent with that thinking. Involvement takes the form of information-sharing and can be accomplished in a number of ways. It can be achieved in state-of-the-company meetings, informal group sessions, one-on-one discussions, the Intranet, etc. Whatever the method, the objective must be to provide employees with an ongoing understanding of what is happening within the organization (and why), and how their actions impact the success of the organization.

Empowerment is the ongoing process of providing anyone in an organization with the ability to address anything that stands in the way of doing the right thing at any given time. It means that an employee is given the ability to solve a problem or improve a condition. It means that, at no time, does an employee feel ‘trapped’ in a situation. If something is standing in the way of a quality result, the employee can contribute to correcting that situation. Successful empowerment can be achieved by addressing four basic elements or “tools.”

Four Basic Elements of Empowerment

Belief
Employees need to genuinely believe the company’s leadership sincerely intends for them to be empowered. An employee also needs to believe that he or she has the capability of performing in an empowered manner. Rarely will an organization experience successful empowerment if employees do not believe management is supportive of their individual ability to solve a problem or improve a condition.

Information
Employees need to have information regarding the results of their actions, as well as information relative to the processes they are performing. In order to determine the need to solve a problem or improve a condition, employees need to receive feedback on these measures. If employees are unaware of the conditions that surround them, the chances of developing empowered actions are minimal at best.

Skills
Employees need the skills necessary to act in an empowered manner. These skills fall into two areas; technical skills and interpersonal skills. Technical skills involve those skills specific to an employee’s job. Acting in an empowered manner requires that an employee be trained and consistently updated on the technical skills needed to perform in their area of responsibility. Interpersonal skills involve the skills required for an employee to effectively work with others when acting in an empowered manner. These skills include effective communication and respect for themselves and others, as well as understanding personal styles and how they affect individual and team performance.

Opportunity
This element involves providing employees with the time, tools, and resources necessary to act in an empowered manner. Expecting empowered actions while neglecting the required time, tools, and resources will result in employee frustration. Additionally, it is extremely important to provide employees with the process and guidelines for being empowered. Employees need to understand the steps they can take to solve a problem or improve a condition. Without clearly defined guidelines and processes, many well-intentioned empowerment initiatives bring unsatisfactory and, in some cases, disastrous results.

How involved and empowered do employees in your organization feel? 

There is one way to find out – ask them. Conduct an Employee Perception Survey. Putting in place an effective employee feedback program is the responsibility of strong and confident leaders. In order to develop an involved and empowered workforce, an organization’s leadership team must provide the necessary coaching, guidance, and facilitation to foster its development. Identifying the areas employees feel are in need of special attention and focus will help direct those development efforts.

If you are trying to ensure a culture of employee involvement and empowerment, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). Tweed-Weber can provide you with a proven method for obtaining employee feedback that can serve as the foundation for the elements of genuine employee engagement.