Thanks to the new range of technologies, the working culture across platforms and boundaries has evolved and lead to the fourth industrial revolution. Fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the advancements have impacted all disciplines, economies, and industries along with the cognitive abilities of our minds. 

How humans collect, organize, maintain, and process information has moved from tangible elements to digital dependencies. No more do we require to maintain books of accounts or track each employee’s progress manually. We have tools and software to rely on these tasks now.  

From altering the processes in a working environment to focusing on individual goals, the organizational structures have transformed and moved to a sphere of digitalization too. Thus, the definitions of productivity, motivation, and success have taken a new shape and meaning. 

Let’s explore the new ways of empowering employees in the structures of the real world!  

What Is Employee Empowerment?

The superpower endowed by technology enables us to process enormous amounts of data in real-time, cutting out manual labor and in turn boosting productivity. This elimination of repetitive tasks leverages us time for handling other jobs like harnessing creativity as a strategic force to power your company. With artificial intelligence and similar know-how, we can now train the managers of the future. Various industries are already ‘reskilling’ employees to cope with the changing dynamics of workplaces and growth opportunities.

Empowerment is more like a decision about risk and reward. It reflects the balance of the expected rewards with potential risks. Smart Empowerment on the other hand, strategically shows a positive impact on the customer experience through real-time decision making. As organizations are moving towards changes in rules, policies, and procedures, leaders are also aiming towards steady and sustained growth with product consistency. This shift has largely occurred with customer becoming the driving force of the market and being at employees’ prerogative. It has given workers a latitude to serve those who hold the key to the success of the business, i.e., the customers. 

Why You Should Empower Your Employees?

Numerous researches have proved how stronger job performance, job satisfaction, and commitment to the organization is always associated with empowered employees. Usual ways of empowerment including delegating authority and decision-making, sharing information, and seeking inputs can motivate only a certain type of performance and employee. To reach a level where you encourage employees to generate novel ideas and think of new ways of doing things, an innovative methodology is needed. Leaders want employees to have a bond where they help others in the workplace, volunteer for extra effort, and are willing to support their organization outside of an official capacity.

A meta-analysis was conducted on leaders empowering subordinates and examined the results of 105 studies. It included more than 30,000 employees from 30 countries. The paper aimed to look for an empowering leadership style that was linked to improving job performance and held it against different routine task performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and creativity. 

And the results showcased: 

• Leaders who are empowered are much more effective at influencing employee creativity and behavior. 
• Employees are also more likely to be trusted by their subordinates when empowered by leaders.
• The performance was influenced in Eastern, compared to Western, cultures when leaders empowered employees, and they showed a more positive impact on employees who had less experience working in their organizations.

Smart Empowerment for the Real World

Knowledge workers’ are using the tools that augment options available to them rather than relying on costly and time-consuming degrees. 

Staying relevant in the world where an entire industry can be rendered obsolete with the advent of technology, has become a task. Every organization is looking to top the charts and stay uptight with their strategies and approaches when dealing with customers directly. 

The company Best Buy is known for its deals, customer satisfaction and is just as susceptible to online customer complaints as to any other company. What it does differently is the process of managing clients and employees. More than 2,500 Best Buy employees have signed up for a system, Twelpforce, which enables them to see Best Buy–related problems that customers have aired on Twitter and they can respond to them. 

As the leaders of Best Buy support technological innovation, Barry Judge, the company’s CMO, has made it a priority to identify and encourage new ideas like Twelpforce. Judge’s marketing department is always learning. “If you are not curious, you won’t last long in marketing,” he says. “You have to have some failures to see that.”

Similarly, LinkedIn data showed that millennial workers change an average of 2.85 jobs during their first five years out of college which is near twice as many as Gen Xers. Fortunately, advances in technology aren’t eradicating opportunities and these modern workers, coming to be known as ‘knowledge workers’ are using the tools that augment options available to them rather than relying on costly and time-consuming degrees. Becoming the best tool for making your career success, employers are also endorsing broad learning and multidisciplinary skills, according to a report by the Association of American Colleges & Universities.

9 Tips for Empowering Employees

Communication Structures

When companies have a top-down communication, employees can feel insignificant and sometimes, directionless too. As a leader, you should give a structured approach to employees to channelize their inputs, thoughts, and feedback. If you help them understand and acknowledge the value of their ideas and inputs, it will give a sense of belongingness to them and in turn foster open communication. 

Reward Self-Starters

Improvement is the basis of growth for both the individual and the company. However, people don’t have sufficient resources to acquire that knowledge required for change and improvement.  

Rewarding employees who are self-starters and initiate growth are known to do better in the overall performance of the organization. When they apply the new skills and step up to leadership opportunities, they perform better. 

Encourage Failure

Giving employees an opportunity to try new things in a safe environment gives them a chance to execute new ideas and learn from the feedback. If leaders don’t lose the reign and always hold the approval-seeking attitude, subordinates will become risk-averse and dependent for the smallest of tasks. As leaders, you should create milestone checkpoints or set up pilot projects where people can test their skills to gain understanding and feel comfortable innovating new approaches. 

Provide Information

When leaders hold on to information and do not let employees garner benefits from it and yet expect good decisions, it can lead to disharmony in the team. The true quality of the leader is to decipher the exact knowledge bank to be shared in a structured and consistent manner. An employee should have a clear idea of the vision, purpose, and direction of the company. However, it’s a task of the leader to impart this vision and lead. 

"Google operates on the belief that people are fundamentally good," says Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations. Google empowers its employees with an abundance of resources that range from workspace supplies to food, to mental health support apart from trusting them to make their own decisions. 

Define Roles

If an employee doesn’t have key responsibility areas specified, they might not be able to perform well without boundaries. Establishing individual roles and responsibilities with employees gives scope for a clear and cooperative work environment. 

For instance, Adobe's employee handbook clearly defines the goals and responsibilities to their workers and then lets them work without micromanaging. In turn, they've harnessed incredible creative innovation from their employees while keeping them engaged and happy. Their Adobe Life blog follows the stories of some of their employees, showcasing their job satisfaction and talents.

Hold Accountability

The importance of meeting expectations is only comprehensive when accountability is maintained by the leaders. However, to reach that stage, employees should be aware of the consequences of failure too. Measuring rewards and keeping a track of each employees’ success gives a consistent and diligent effort from everyone. 

Support Independence

Hand holding is a big no when it comes to raising a newbie in the organization. Leaders should give employees reasons and opportunity to stretch out on their own than being their babysitters. Even letting them lead to making them learn through experimentations is a better way to build the respect of their colleagues while preparing to be great empowering leaders. 

Appreciate Efforts

When employees are empowered, they work and seek a level of satisfaction beyond monetary terms. They move above the financial stability and need appreciation and value of their contributions from the higher management. Leaders here shouldn’t shy away from complimenting the subordinates or from celebrating good work. Similarly, honest feedback is always welcomed when coming with valuable inputs for future tasks. 

One such example can be extracted from Netflix, where the only existing policy for employees is to simply act in the company's best interest. As no expense limits or tracking employees, they trust workers to operate their best judgment in situations and trust they aren't there to rip the company off. 

Ask Yourself

The most important part of the process of leadership is to be courageous enough to self-question and self-analyze the methods and approaches you are taking to lead the team. Following are the few important questions for self-assessment: 

• Do my rules serve a purpose?
• Am I making work faster, easier or getting in the way?
• Is my default answer yes or no?
• Do I give people an opportunity to fix problems? Or do I take over?
• Does my team knows why their work matters 
• Do I withhold information that would lead to better decisions?
• Are my employees driving their own growth? 
• Have I created an environment where risk is encouraged?

These questions will keep you in check whenever you feel your team is falling into an abyss and the reasons aren’t clear or are beyond control. Asking them every once in a while will lead to a smooth terrain of growth. 

Next Step

There's an abundance of choice when it comes to picking the right approach to leadership. With easily accessible technology and boom of the internet, solutions to problems at all levels can be harnessed with innovation. Apart from experiments, there are toolkits and extensive knowledge that can be channelized to enable a digital strategy. 

However, a four-step approach--discover, prototype, experience, and monitor is the simplest methodology to adopt. Where a deep understanding of ‘’personas’’ at the workplace is involved at each stage to enhance and create a better experience. The methodology forms a complete circle where you can monitor adoption through published leaderboards.