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Employee empowerment and motivation are board level (strategic) issues

Submitted by Alex Milovanovic FCMI on Thu, 03/03/2011 - 09:14

In the challenging business environment of 2011, it will be even more important for a success of any organisation to find a way how to motivate its employees to release their full potentials. Recession years and continuously tough competition in world markets made individual innovation and productivity improvements among the very few opportunities for most businesses who want to gain and retain a competitive advantage.

I recognise individual empowerment among other performance enablers as the key force for individual motivation in both profit and non-profit organisations. That is more than “being valued” which is basically having a clear job description and performance expectations. Individual empowerment includes “being valued” but also explores potential through training, fulfilling ambitions through career advancement, expressing and testing innovative ideas and achieving success and financial security.

It must be in the strategy of an organisation how to reward and motivate its employees as employees’ contribution to business creates most value for many organisations. This is why issues like individual empowerment and employee motivation must find their way during strategy development and formulation at the board level as later ‘adjustments’ by middle and line management during the execution phase fall more under ‘fire-fighting’.

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Comments

Submitted by Ian Owen CMgr MCMI on Thu, 03/03/2011 - 15:10 Profile image

Empowerment needs to start as the top. The reason for this is that traditional managers (in the directional leadership sense) often need supporting as the management style is totally different. However, if it is not started at the top, often th managers of managers have not got support (Ideus, 2005). The second reason for empowement starting from the top is that the strategic organisation must be aligned to cater for an empowering culture with a clear vision, otherwise, how can empowered employees know whether their decisions are working towards the right goal?

Finally, boards must understand they cannot empower someone; that is delegation. All they can do is create an enviroment where empowement flurishes and their best option is provide a support network to enable employees to make decisions without fearing of any fallout.

 

Great topic!!

Submitted by on Thu, 03/03/2011 - 17:26

I quite agree Alex, this is too big an issue for senior managers not to put it at the top of their agenda.

Submitted by Christos Monoyios MCMI on Fri, 04/03/2011 - 07:32

Quite a big issue nowadays, and one cannot stress the importance of such a topic in a period of recession. Managers should indeed identify and understand the importance of employees and how to get the maximum out of them. Employee empowerment is one of the key features that will eventually, according to today's hectic environment, lead to survival and, in the long term, to help companies gain competitive advantage.

Managers must find the enablers to empower employees as it will eventually benefit the company as a whole.

What are the obstacles though that today's managers face, and cannot understand or cannot forsee the potential in their employees and in return the benefit that employee empowerment will provide to their businesses??

Feel free to provide your own views from your managerial experience.