Empowering Your Employees to be Successful

The success of your organization depends on the success of its employees - if your employees are disconnected or disengaged, your business can only go so far. A successful workforce can bring your business to new heights and unlock brand new opportunities, creating opportunity for growth and prosperity. The most successful employees are those who have been empowered by their organization, allowing them to work at their very best and develop their skills and knowledge in order to benefit the business.

Empowerment involves offering a degree of autonomy to employees, giving them more control over their day to day activities and decisions. Empowering employees means giving them a more significant voice, offering them opportunities for growth and development, and recognizing their efforts, resulting in more motivated workers, a more trusting environment, increased creativity and productivity, and higher employee retention.

Employees who are empowered are happier, more satisfied with their place in the organization, and more productive. It’s easy to say you should empower your employees, and significantly more difficult to actually make it happen. With the right amount of trust, planning, and support, you can create an empowered workforce with the motivation to bring your business to new levels. All of this goes without saying, but how do you actually empower your employees? Engagement, respect, and reward are three ways to get you there. 

Keeping employees engaged

Employee engagement is extremely important in empowering your workforce - a disengaged worker cannot be a good employee, as they won’t be truly happy in their role and won’t desire more autonomy. The key to empowering your employees is to keep them happy and involved in your operations. You can do this by encouraging effective collaboration and communication among your teams, ensuring that everybody has an important role to play, and that they can make a difference through individual actions.

Recognizing outstanding performance and rewarding performers who continuously go above and beyond is another great way to improve and maintain engagement, as is encouraging them to be creative in their work - whether it’s how they approach their work or solve problems, encouraging creativity shows employees that they’re not only allowed to think outside the box, but that they can be rewarded for doing so.

Be more flexible with your employees

Employees have come to expect a more flexible workplace environment - flexibility is seen as a major draw to employees, and goes a long way in keeping them engaged. Whether it’s allowing workers to set their own working hours, work remotely, or create a unique working space, offering flexibility to your employees shows them that their organization cares about them and holds trust in them. More flexibility has been seen to lead to an increase in employee performance and productivity, all at a very small cost for your business. Employees with a greater degree of flexibility are more likely to remain with their workplace, less likely to experience high levels of stress, and be more engaged in their work.

Offering more flexibility also shows respect for your employees as people and trust in their time management skills. Giving them your trust and respect will pay large dividends in earning their loyalty. 

Create opportunities for professional development

Creating and promoting professional development opportunities is extremely beneficial to employees and organizations, allowing new skills and knowledge to be learned and developed which create both personal and professional growth for employees. The more somebody is allowed to improve their skills and knowledge, the more successful and valuable that employee will be in the long term.

Creating these opportunities for your employees shows them that you have plans for them, whether it’s offering them a new role within the organization, planning for upward mobility that may result in an eventual management role, or simply giving them more responsibility in their current role. Self-improvement can be time consuming and costly, and when an organization creates these opportunities for their employees and can be flexible with their schedules to ensure success, it lets workers know that they’re valued and seen as an asset.

Every member of your team wants something different from their role in your business - they might want to move up in the ranks, take on new roles and responsibilities, or just master their craft. It’s up to you to work with employees to develop customized programs that will allow them to achieve their professional goals. Customized training programs will get your team members to where they want to be and benefit your organization by motivating them to constantly learn and improve. Meet with your employees to find out what they want, and what they could improve on, and work with them to figure out how to help them improve.

Identify when employees are facing challenges

It’s inevitable that employees are going to face challenges and discover areas where their skills aren’t enough. In order to empower employees, you need to be able to recognize where this is happening so you can work with employees to help them overcome these difficulties. Productivity intelligence tools like Prodoscore can offer increased visibility into how your employees are working within your favorite workplace solutions, showing you where they’re running into challenges and revealing opportunities where you can assist them.

Recognize how hard they’re working, even when they’re facing challenges that they may not be able to overcome, and provide them with the necessary resources, tools, and feedback they need to excel. Giving them access to the necessary resources allows them to retain autonomy without somebody having to step in and solve the problem for them. Providing resources allows them to work towards overcoming challenges themselves, and providing constructive feedback can lead them in the right direction when they stray from the path.

When employees are having real issues, it might be more helpful to create a roadmap to improvement by offering additional training opportunities, professional development, and coaching that will allow them to overcome these situations in the future. Show employees that you want to see them succeed by providing these things for them, and keep an open line of communication so you can identify other issues and challenges that might exist as barriers for them.

An empowered workforce is an engaged workforce. By empowering your employees, you’re investing in the hard work of your employees, setting them up for meaningful careers within your organization, and showing them that they have your complete and total trust. When handled well, you’ll quickly find that your employees are happier, have increased job satisfaction, higher levels of productivity, and are ready to take your business to the next level.

Prodoscore can help empower your employees by giving them visible metrics into their own performance. Contact us today for a demo to find out more.