Commentary: Boss, this is how you can empower your workers amid rapid workplace changes
The pace of change in our modern workplace is accelerating.
Driven by forces of technological change, digitalisation, societal and demographic shifts, and blurring lines between work and personal domains, such sweeping transformation poses significant challenges for employers and workers alike.
Difficult questions that need to be addressed in these challenges include: How do we motivate people in jobs where routine tasks are quickly being taken over by algorithms or robots that operate many times faster than humans while making fewer mistakes?
How do we manage a workforce that will be more inclusive and diverse than ever before?
How do we engage workers who are faced with increasing conflicting demands from both work and personal demands?
How do we develop and maintain a culture of cohesion and collaboration among a dispersed workforce where individuals can be more isolated than ever before?
The concept of employee empowerment has been practised in management for almost six decades since the 1970s and used today by an estimated 80 per cent of organisations in some shape or form.
Yet companies and their managers still struggle to realise its potential, viewing it as a risky and time-consuming exercise, and unwilling to give up their power and authority.
Such a mindset is unfortunate.
Empowerment, when implemented properly, can still be an effective practice for organisations and their workforce to cope with and even thrive amid the challenges highlighted above.
EMPOWERMENT AS BOTH STRUCTURAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL
What exactly does empowerment entail?
Most associate it with a set of structures and policies aimed at decentralising power and authority so that individual workers are able to proactively take charge and respond to the requirements of their job.
However, perhaps an even more important aspect of empowerment is psychological in nature, where the individual intrinsically experiences motivation to take control of one’s work.
Such experience manifests in the increased meaningfulness experienced on the job, a self-deterministic attitude that one’s actions are totally, solely determined by their choices, competence felt towards one’s ability to successfully perform the work, and a belief that one can impact significant outcomes in the organisation.
This focus on worker psychology suggests that simply providing empowerment in terms of structure and policy is insufficient to bring about any real impact at the workplace.
Such an approach will likely falter in the face of the technological and societal challenges that increasingly characterise modern workplaces.
3 WAYS TO PSYCHOLOGICALLY EMPOWER EMPLOYEES
First, employers should put in place a talent management system that encourages information sharing, participation, and continuous learning.
Technologies that can be particularly helpful are electronic bulletin boards and collaborative platform tools — solutions that facilitate both synchronous and asynchronous idea generation and feedback giving.
In order to help workers reskill and upskill, multiple career advancement pathways should also be provided, complemented by access to formal and informal learning opportunities in the form of training and the ability to collaborate with teams outside of one’s specialisation.
Furthermore, financial incentives and recognition awards need to be tied closely to contributions that add value to the company’s business and customers.
This can take the form of relatively simple gestures. For example, Airbnb encourages managers to handwrite notes and holds pop-up celebrations of outstanding performance, while Google’s “Peer Bonus” system facilitates peer recognition through personalised messages on a shared internal platform that can even be accompanied with cash bonuses.
Second, special attention should be paid to providing supervisors the support and tools they need to reinforce the empowerment of their subordinates.
Supervisors must be trained to develop trusting relationships with employees who now have unprecedented autonomy and control over how they accomplish their work objectives.
They play an especially critical role in sense-making for their less experienced subordinates, providing clarity on organisational goals and initiatives so that workers can visualise how their work contributes towards the overall business and its competitive advantage.
Supervisors must also be assured enough to allow and even encourage employee participation in decision-making that has meaningful impact on team and business bottom lines.
For instance, informal jam sessions involving employees and their supervisors across departments can not only boost participation, but also be fertile settings for creative ideas that drive innovation.
Constant and constructive feedback that forms the base of mentorship and role-modelling in work relationships should also be embraced as a key part of the organisational routine.
Third, any endeavours at employee empowerment are also best supported by an employee-centric culture.
Employers will need to expand their current workforce goals that are geared towards productivity and quality to adopting a more holistic view of employee well-being as an organisational mandate.
This should go beyond simply providing material resources that are required to complete work-related tasks, to also showing consideration for employees physical and mental health, as well as social needs and work-life balance.
Onsite well-being workshops, flexible work arrangements, and even regular fitness challenges are good ways to demonstrate such commitment.
Organisations should intentionally work to encourage support networks among peers that not only serve to drive collaboration on work matters, but also act as safe spaces for emotional support and other resources dedicated to ensuring overall well-being.
Each member should also be equipped with skills to provide basic support and mental health first aid to their colleagues.
At the same time, employee assistance programmes should offer employees access to avenues where they can seek appropriate professional help.
Furthermore, structures also need to be put in place to ensure impartiality, transparency and consistency in decision-making, especially when it comes to the allocation of resources and distribution of rewards.
Employers also need to engage in the routine solicitation of employee input when key decisions are being made or in the planning of initiatives that can have strategic impact on the overall direction of the company.
This helps to build a trusting relationship between employers and their workforce, which in turn creates a healthy environment for employee empowerment to thrive.
ROLE OF WORKERS
Employers play a critical role in providing the above structures to drive empowerment — however, workers should not simply be passive recipients of such practices.
Employees need to take charge and engage in proactive career self-management by consistently learning and upskilling to ensure that their job-relevant skill sets are updated enough to take advantage of the opportunities that empowerment provides.
Individuals also need to be future-focused in asking how empowerment can bring about improvements to their job and stakeholders like the employer organisation, coworkers, customers, and suppliers.
They should also be proactive to engage in behaviours like scanning the job environment, feedback seeking, social-network building, which can all put them in a better position to utilise empowerment for the benefit of their jobs and employer.
The effectiveness of empowerment initiatives will be amplified when workers are proactive enough to take advantage of such opportunities.
Overall, successful empowerment needs to go beyond formal changes and provisions in organisational structures and hierarchies. It needs to be supported by employer investments in talent management, supporting supervisory leadership, and employee well-being.
It also requires a workforce that is engaged and proactive enough to utilise empowerment for the betterment of their work.
Only then can the potential of empowerment be realised to help companies and their workforce deal with the technological, societal, and personal challenges evident in the modern workplace.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kang Yang Trevor Yu is an associate professor in the division of leadership, management and organisation at the Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University. His areas of research and expertise focus on creating valuable organisational cultures through employer branding and talent management practices.
