Empowerment means delegating and trusting all the people in the organization and giving them the feeling that they own their own work, forgetting the pyramidal, impersonal structures and where decision-making was only done at the highest levels of the organization. If there is something clear today is that the increasing complexity of the environment and competitiveness. To adapt to new demands, organizations must:
1. Be customer-centric: because the customer is the generator of resources for the organization and has growing and changing expectations.
2. Be agile
Today's customer needs speed in relations with the organization, so the organizational structure must be agile in its response to customers, both in strategic changes in the environment and in the day-to-day running of the organization. The client does not allow that her interlocutor does not have decision-making capacity and that the organization is not very agile due to internal bureaucracy.
3. Be flexible
The client, in addition to being demanding, has continually changing expectations, so the organization must be flexible and for this, the flexibility of the people that make it up is needed.
4. Continuously improve
Everyone in the organization must accept the fact that the organization must continually improve to be competitive.
5. Be competitive in costs
In addition to what has been previously developed, customers want products / services at an adequate cost, so they must have effective and efficient processes.
In this way, the cost of supervision is too great to be able to stay in a modern organization… people have to make decisions and thus avoid continuous supervision. When you reflect on what the cost of a person is in an organization with continuous supervision, it is found that it is much higher than in an organization with autonomous people and with decision-making power.
All these elements mean that organizational structures have to be changed in order to respond to the new environment. Within the new needs of organizations, concepts such as leadership, internal communication, self-directed teams, etc. could be included. Or we can group them all into one and give them the name of empowerment.
What is empowerment?
In the worst case, we find organizations where:
All tasks are supervised by superiors since it is assumed that people in the lower levels of the organization are not able to carry out their tasks.
There is no tolerance for failure and "bosses" think that people should only do what they have been told to do and should not fail.
People only care about their wages and vacations and they don't care about their work.
No one takes more responsibility than necessary.
Improvements are not usually introduced since there is a lot of fear of change.
There are no clear performance evaluation systems and people do not know if they are doing their job correctly.
Repetitive and low value-added work is carried out.
Empowerment means delegating and trusting all the people in the organization and giving them the feeling that they own their own work, forgetting the pyramidal, impersonal structures and where decision-making was only done at the highest levels of the organization.
Thus, the old pyramid hierarchy is replaced by self-directed teams, where information is shared with everyone and people have the opportunity and responsibility to do their best by getting more motivated and committed people.
Within this definition, the concept of delegation becomes vitally important. It is based on trust, respect and tolerance of failure and understanding that the process involves training, communication and clarity that is the only way to achieve the desired objectives. It is important to differentiate delegating with "not caring" since the delegation process requires:
Evaluate the competencies of the candidate
Define responsibility.
Delegating authority.
Define performance objectives.
Training and development.
Provide information and knowledge.
Provide feedback.
Recognition.
Empowerment benefits
Empowerment has the following general benefits:
Increased satisfaction and trust of the people who make up the organization
Increase responsibility, authority and commitment to customer satisfaction.
Creativity increases and resistance to change decreases.
Members of the organization share leadership
Confidence in communications and relationships are improved.
Increase enthusiasm and a positive attitude.
Have more efficient decision-making processes
Greater communication at all levels and in all directions.
Thus, for the organization, all these benefits result in a more profitable organization thanks to having more satisfied customers and more happy and committed people.
At the level of people, with the use of this method, people feel competent, considering themselves effective and feeling integrated into the organization and aligned with its strategy, in which they assume the highest level of delegation from their superiors.
How to get it
Empowerment is not something concrete but is to redefine the way in which the organization manages the people that comprise it. Many others appear within this concept such as leadership, self-directed teams, variable compensation, internal communication, training, recruitment and selection of people, career plans, etc.
For this, the project plan in a schematic way will be:
Obtain full support from senior management for the project
Defining the project vision and sharing it with all the project members
Develop vision of the organization and consensual and shared strategies: the organization must have defined a vision and a strategy that must be defined, known and shared by all the members of the company. In addition, the organization must also have defined its values.
Creation of work teams in a progressive way
Train all the organization's personnel in concepts related to leadership, delegation, self-directed teams, etc.
Properly design positions as well as the tasks, objectives and responsibilities associated with each of them and communicate to all interested parties.
Perfectly define the objectives at the corporate level and those expected from each person and that must be aligned with the organization's strategy
Establish adequate communication systems to have feedback on the system.
Define performance management systems to evaluate and develop the performance of each person in the organization, identifying the strengths and weaknesses and consequent action plans as well as associated career plans.
Definition of variable remuneration systems
Some problems in practice
It must be borne in mind that to introduce empowerment into the culture of the organization, a significant effort is required from the people who make it up and the impact on them is very important.
The vision of the project and the results that will be achieved must be very clear since the path is not easy and leaving the project unfinished is worse than not having started it due to the uncertainty and tension it creates in people.
To be clear about the complexity of the project, one only has to think about how we have to change what we have been practicing for 20 or 30 years (centralist, authoritarian and individualistic organization and where people are executors of orders) to a totally different organization with a system decentralized, with shared decisions and teamwork and with decision makers at all levels. If all this needs to be changed in a few months / years… imagine the change that needs to be made.
In conclusion, empowerment (or modern management of people and human capital) brings comparative advantages to the company in terms of customer relations, costs, agility and flexibility… profitability in a word… although the transition is not easy at all.
