The Power Of An Empowered Workforce
By Business Desk
Thursday, March 15, 2018.
Power. The word is being thrown around a lot these
days, and sometimes for strange reasons. It seems that the political obsession
with power will never end, but is there a positive aspect to power that we can implement in our own firms? Of course. The power to empower our employees.
Think about it. While you might not want all your staff to have a chance at
running your position from a self-serving perspective, ideally you should
desire to make your employers as competent as they possibly can be. There are
many reasons for this form of interest. Not all of them are very easy to
ascertain in the initial analysis.
For this reason, the
hows and whys of staff empowerment are to be explained in this article. This will
show you that for every dollar spent investing in your workforce, you can
expect a serious return in the operational capacity of your business. Perhaps this is what you’re looking for. Perhaps
you’re simply interested to know just how optimized your operations could
become. Or, perhaps you’re just in it to make obscene profits. The list of
benefits emanating from an empowered workforce are hard to list in full.
But, we’ll make a solid
attempt:
Problems Are Solvable
One of the benefits of
keeping your staff well trained and informed is that they will often have
autonomy over their decisions. As long as they are accountable and only make
decisions with full confidence, you might find that the effective time of your
team is used ideally. This is because instead of continually calling over a
manager to oversee a problem, your team will at least be tempted to provide a
solution before asking for help. This is the way of the future, especially
considering how more and more autonomous process will start to take care of
menial tasks. Creative minds are those who will foresee problems and enact
solutions before there are even problems to witness. This form of working
intelligence will become the thing that really matters, and an empowered
employee will usually have this in spades.
Turnover
Of course, measuring an
empowered workforce in competency does not always depend on the results they
bring in. It could be that your job satisfaction levels skyrocket and you
experience less of a staff turnover. This is because those firms that actively
train their staff and help them develop skills are great places to stay. A
worker will see your role not only as a venue for personal funding, but a place
to further their career. Even if they don’t stay with your firm for a long
period, they will always have positive words to say about the place that
invested in them so much.
Less staff turnover
means spending less time training new people in the nuances of your firm. It
means hiring internally, which is much faster and allows you to train more
thoroughly from the start. It lessens any strange compatibility issues within
skill sets. It also improves staff morale as the entire team believe they could
head up the ranks if they only put the effort in.
Also, low staff turnover
in your firm will seem attractive to outside investors and those looking to
apply for roles. It makes your firm seem competitive and desirable, and like
many aspects of business this will have a knock on effect to all benefits you
experience. Invest in and make your staff competent through the best training
methods imaginable, and watch how people truly respect and appreciate the
position they are in.
To illustrate this
further, here is a fun question for you. Let’s say you’re being considered for
a new job after a period of unemployment. The job doesn’t particularly come
close to the payment you once received during your last employment. However,
there are chances to gain access to some of the best training in the industry,
seeing professional guest speakers, potentially gaining new qualifications, and
complete on-site practical experience (however that is defined in your role.)
Would you be tempted to take that role? We’d say that long-term, this could
certainly be a better option.
Be that firm for your
employees, even if you might have to offer somewhat less of an introductory
salary for new recruits. The benefits of empowering your staff to this degree
will likely be something you feel for years.
Communication
An empowered staff know
how to communicate with each other. This is because when competency abounds in
an office, so do the stakes of communication. You’ll notice that the dialogue
of the office becomes more effective. Conversations become shorter, but no less
lacking in content. Abbreviations abound for the ease of use of everyone
involved. People find citing certain protocols in your policy guide is easier
to handle, because it is formatted more easily in their understanding and
they’ve had to time learn it.
It also allows staff to
find strong new potential in reading aggregate forms of information. For
example, using a Tableau system of business data analysis will become much
easier with site-wide tableau training courses, allowing your staff to come to truly creative and
practical solutions you might not know you need. These ideas will spread, be
contributed to, and refined before being presented up the chain of your
hierarchy.
Let’s take the
comparison of the military. Are the strongest divisions in the world those with
the best leaders? Well, somewhat. But, do the delta forces, those with the
strongest and most elite immediate practical units outshine what a larger
number of new recruits and a competent leader could manage? Well, the idea of
elite units is that they can take on challenges the new qualified recruits
cannot handle. So, make everyone on your workforce floor (to the degree that
you can,) the equivalent of an elite ground unit.
When competency is felt
at the bottom, it travels upwards. This is a new way to think of business, as
usually the directive of the manager is followed without question in most
businesses. However, with this perspective and investment in great training,
the manager becomes more of a facilitator and decision maker, in tandem with
and not against those under them. This affords a creative, collaborative office
atmosphere in which everyone is either encouraged or inspired, and jobs get
done through sheer cooperative effort alone. Not bad for your first business.
The power of an
empowered workforce is more than possible to achieve. Just be sure to invest in
the right places, listen to your staff needs, and try to lead by example. The rest will follow.
