Have you ever placed an order for food, and when you go to pick it up, you realize the order is completely wrong? You mention it to the individual who greeted you at the door, and they bend over backward to correct the situation (even if it wasn’t their fault)? Many companies are spending more time training managers on how to “empower” their employees. But what does empowerment mean?
Empowerment is about sharing degrees of power with lower-level employees to better serve the customer. To me, empowerment is about permitting individuals to use their unique talents, and create an avenue to flourish, without having to run to management and ask for permission to do something.
Empowering employees is not easy though, because it requires that not only the company but management is committed to continuous employee development. It means fostering an environment of trust and helping employees learn from successes and evaluate misses or near-misses.
Here are six things you can do to help empower your team to succeed:
1. Be Transparent and Share Information: Transparency and sharing information with employees is important because it not only helps to build trust; it gives employees important information that will allow them to make the best possible decisions in critical situations.
2. Establish clear goals and objectives: Be clear with your vision, goals/objectives, and roles. This will help create the framework needed to guide employees to make empowered decisions when working with customers.
3. “It is o.k. to make mistakes”: If you empower employees to make decisions that will help keep customers happy, then you must be willing to allow them to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Scolding an employee who tried something new will only send a message to others you aren’t interested in trying something new.
4. Create an environment that celebrates both wins and losses: Do not just celebrate the wins, celebrate the employees who took a risk but maybe did not obtain the results intended but learned valuable lessons for themselves, the company, and was able to share those with others.
5. Create a learning environment: This is an ongoing process where teams look at various situations and discuss them together to determine how they might handle things differently in the future to achieve the desired goals and objectives of the company.
6. Allow teams to develop: This occurs by slowly and carefully transferring responsibilities from managers to teams. This can be a very scary and difficult process for managers because it takes time, training, trust, and a lot of persistence. But it can shift an employee to depending upon its manager to make decisions to be self-sufficient.
Working to create an environment that empowers employees has been shown to not only increase customer satisfaction levels but also improve employee morale. It takes training, practice, and the ability to accept mistakes as a part of the learning process – but it is well worth the effort in the long run!
How do you or your company work to empower employees? Share your successful ideas at hello@tarynmconsulting.com
