How Do We Empower?

Did it ever come into your mind that if only you were given the chance to be in authority, you will give your employees or subordinates what’s due to them? Which led me to ask, how do we keep an employee motivated, anyway?

To organize is to properly setup a structure and allocate human resources to achieve objectives. As structure is to organizational design decisions and human resources to jobs design decisions. While organizational design involves creating departments, jobs design involves creating jobs to effectively use human resources. And where can we find the context of motivating employees? Yes, on jobs design decisions.

I say, employee empowerment is employee motivation. We may have different motivations to work. It may be the pay, the learning, the experience, the society we are moving in, etc. These are factors that management needs to consider from the starting stage of organizing.

Aside from pay (which of course is the basic reason I work), I am more motivated when I am given flexible authority over my responsibilities. Have you ever experienced working within a system or procedure you are forced to follow when you can just perform well with your own procedures but still arriving at the same result? I bet you hate the feeling. Furthermore when it is a routine job. It bores you and makes you ineffective.

Empowerment in the organization allows every individual to take initiative of their own work and review them accordingly if they have improved the services of the company. This is an empowerment that is job enrichment. It gives each employee an “autonomy, and control over the way the job is accomplished”. And I am glad that the company I am working with is giving me this kind of privilege. I am too with my subordinates. It makes each staff, not only in the supervisory level, become leaders of their own.

For example, the QA team I am handling. I set deadlines, assign them tasks and give them general instructions. Within the project production stage, I expect that they provide reports (bug reporting) no matter how they do it in detail or how they do it to beat the deadline. They may seek the help of other staffs, communicate with the Product Planners for behavior and closely coordinate with the programmers. I give them the control over the procedures they will take as long as they know exactly what they are doing. An empowered employee should hold two major aspects of empowerment that are inseparable: direction and capability. The team may know what they need to accomplish, but if their capability (knowledge and skills) are not enough, the project will fail.

Another type of empowerment in our company is team building which “involves settling conflicts, sharing team success, and assign tasks that use team members’ strengths“. I see our programming team as best example for this area. I have witnessed this when I was working with them on a rewrite project where the Perl version system was rewritten to PHP. The Supervisor assigns modules to his team members depending on the depth of knowledge and the experience they have in their previous employment. Like for example, the accounting modules go to the one with more experience in accounting software. Then they do code reviews where they can give suggestions and advices on what is best approach or function to use.

Other empowerment activities we have are training and seminars, meetings, and presentations.

Employees are empowered when they have the following: knowledge and skills, information, material resources, and the authority to make decisions. If each employee is empowered, there is no doubt that the organization is moving toward its goals.

“Empowerment is the capability to make a difference in the attainment of individual, team, and organizational goals” (Oden, 1999).