Giving employees the power to act and make decisions means letting them do so within your company. It also means that there is trust and understanding so that these actions are in line with the goals of the company.
Empowering employees is important if you want to grow a business that will last. Even though one or two entrepreneurs can build a company from the ground up with hard work and dedication, true growth comes from many people working together. Instead of having a strict leader-follower mentality, “multiplying” yourself makes your organization stronger and more capable.
How Do You Empower Your Employees?
Employee empowerment is a way of life. It takes more trust, clear communication, and smartly delegating tasks. Consider working with hr consultancy services and using the following steps to give employees more power:
Delegate To Develop
When you delegate to get rid of boring tasks, you often miss a chance to make your team stronger and give them more power. Instead, give tasks to your employees to help them grow and develop their skills and responsibilities. Personally I would never have been able to build a Keynote Speaker career alongside Digital Agency without delegation and a trusted team. I talk more about this in my video about leading by creating a challenge.
Make It Clear What You Want
Define the limits of what your employee is allowed to do. By making clear expectations for your employees (but not micromanaging them), you give them the freedom to make decisions while ensuring those decisions align with company goals. Clarity in your vision should cascade into you clear business objectives, which should flow into clear job descriptions and in turn, people you know exactly what you need them to achieve.
Let Employees Handle Their Own Tasks
It’s fine if an employee doesn’t get from A to B in the same way you would. Accept that when you give a task to someone else, they may do it differently than you would. Give up control, don’t micromanage, and realise that your way may not be the best (or only) way to finish a project. Remember that there’s a lot more value in someone else’s idea.
Tell Them What The Organisation Wants To Do
More and more, it’s important for employees to feel like they’re part of something bigger than just another part of a machine. By making it clear to your employees what the organization’s vision is and how each team member fits into that vision, you give them the power to know that what they do makes a difference.
At Digitlab, we take this a step further and use a product called Officevibe to take our vision and unpack it into clear business goals and OKRs. These goals are then further unpacked into team goals and individual OKRs. Each person on our team meets with their managers frequently in one-on-ones to discuss their OKR progress, their experience in the business, and personal challenges and look for ways to hurdle challenges and find success.
Thank Them For Their Hard Work
When you thank someone for a job well done, they are more likely to do it again (and do it even better). It will also encourage them to keep coming up with new ideas, to act, and to find solutions to problems. Again, we work hard in our team to build a culture of giving #Kudos to people where it’s due. To highlight the hard work people are doing, to showcase great creativity, good thinking, strong leadership and excellent people.
FREEDOM?
Why should you give employees more freedom? Imagine your ideal team. Is it a group of workhorses who do exactly what you say and nothing more or less? Or is it a group of skilled professionals who work together to solve problems, develop new ideas, and help the company achieve a common goal?
We think it’s the second one. Even if you are the only person in charge of growing your company, you can probably only do so much. For real, long-term growth, you need a strong team of employees who are given the freedom to do their jobs.
