How To Empower Your Employees Today

How do you spark employee empowerment in the workplace? Employers and employees both have unrealistic perceptions about what empowerment is and how it's supposed to work in real-time. Many organizations are pretty successful, but to help your organization leave its competitors in the dust, you need to focus on your employees.

Here’s five steps you can take today to help your employees feel empowered:

1. Encourage Two-Way Communication

‍The process of communication is completed when the receiver is able to understand or decode the message of the sender. The two-way communication is essentially the interchange of information and ideas from the sender to the receiver or vice versa. In addition, employees on the front lines often have deep operational knowledge and valuable perspectives to share that are very different from that of employees higher up in the chain of command.‍

2. Leave Your Office Door Open

‍Your employees are paid to show up every day, but it’s always helpful to receive some encouragement. Everyone wants to feel appreciated. For many, appreciation is just saying thank you. But appreciation only begins with saying thanks. True appreciation is not only recognizing someone's excellent efforts and contribution. The term actually means "to recognize and enjoy" a person's value or good qualities. It means showing respect and understanding as well as gratitude.

‍3. Accept ideas and Input

‍If you want your workers to take a more active role in your business, you need to listen to what they say. If they can’t be involved in these preliminary processes, be open to hearing their ideas and input. Not only can being receptive to new ideas help empower your employees, it can also open up your organization to great new ideas.

‍4. Give constructive feedback

‍Feedback is a useful tool for indicating when things are going in the right direction or for redirecting problem performance. Telling someone they did a “good job” doesn’t give them any direction for what to continue doing in the future. Be specific about the actions or attitudes you’d like to see repeated and the impact it had on others.

‍5. Recognize employees for hard work

‍Employee recognition reinforces and rewards the most important outcomes that people create for your business. Employees gain a better understanding of how you would like to see them contributing in the workplace. Showing appreciation for work well done makes it more likely that a person will do it again (and do it even better). It will also encourage them to continue to be innovative, take action, and to solve problems. Don’t be stingy with your thank you’s.