Empowerment – The Success of your Business

Posted on - 29th August 2009 Tweet

Empowerment – The Success of your Business

We all know that to be a good manager you need to have good people skills.

You need to be a friendly person to staff (subordinates), and aim to break down barriers between management and workers. You then also need to motivate the staff in order to keep them productive and interested in what they do. By doing this should make them value their work, in terms of overall quality and time keeping.

To me, A manager is someone that managers resources and makes sure all the resources work to maximise capabilities, whether that be human resources or capital resources. (Depending on your role, some businesses have individual departments for this).

Empowerment

Some people may think that empowerment of workers is the managers way of getting out of it himself and letting other people to do the work. Although it may seem like this at first, there are other reasons why a manager would empower its workers.

Benefits of Empowerment

• Motivation
  Giving workers more responsibility to do a job (in terms of decision making) can motivate workers according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and that of Hertzberg’s Two Factor Theory. This is because workers feel recognised by management as someone that they feel is a good responsible, hard working employee. This can lead to higher productivity as the employee works harder as well as improved quality.
• Better Decision Making
  Workers carrying out tasks hands on will have a better idea of what’s going on and where improvements could be made on a daily basis. This means that better decisions can be made to save costs or time. Workers may improve their own working environment (Hertzberg’s Hygiene Factor Doesn’t Motivate) but workers will have a sense of achievement which will motivate according to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
• Manager Less Busy
  By encouraging workers to make their own decisions, it can be free up the manager’s time from making non urgent decisions. This means that the manager can spend time on long term strategies for the business as well as putting time in budgeting efficiently. The company in the long run could be better managed, savings time and costs as the manager’s time is better managed.

Drawbacks of Empowerment

• Inexperienced Workers
  Workers may not have the experience to be able to make managerial decisions and effectively the wrong decisions might be made. The worker may decide to use a different material in production and it might not be as long lasting or even tested than the previous component.
• De-motivation
  Workers may feel that manger is just trying to pass the buck a bit so that he has less work-load. Workers may feel that managers are abusing their power and so it just may increase the barriers between managers and workers.

Conclusion

I feel that although empowerment can be a really good way to go in a business. It’s down to the manger to make the overall important decisions in the business as they should be the ones with most experience and they look out for what’s best for the business.

The manger also needs to make sure that the correct people are empowered, they may want to have more responsibility but can they really handle it?

Workers needs to be motivated by a number of factors, job rotation, recognition of achievement and success. This can be done by a yearly appraisal of the employees work.