Building resilient and profitable organizations require some key investments as market conditions and the economies globally continue to remain in a state of constant disruption.
Enterprises are adopting digital technologies and improving infrastructure, trying to identify new market opportunities, and coming up with new product and product improvement roadmaps to improve competitiveness, foster growth, and drive profits.
While these things deliver significant value, for continuous success, business reliance, and constant innovation, successful enterprises focus on the most strategic asset at their disposal – their employees.
At enreap, we believe that organizational excellence is a clear and direct consequence of employee empowerment. Data proves that empowered employees demonstrate stronger job performance, have higher job satisfaction, and are more committed to the organization and we have our experience to back the same.
What does employee empowerment mean?
Employee empowerment is defined as the degree of autonomy or control that employees receive to manage their daily activities. It means enabling the employees to operate with a greater degree of autonomy and giving them a voice in important decision-making areas.
In an empowered environment, people operate with less oversight from higher-level management. The higher levels function as the enablers of productivity by making the right resources, tools, or trust available when work happens, where work happens.
Be it creating process improvements, building new systems or strategies, coming up with new product ideas, or improving productivity and performance, empowered employees are more willing to be creative, go the extra mile, and take more confident decisions.
How employee empowerment works at enreap
We believe that when you enable with trust to succeed, they do. However, employee empowerment is not about leaving employees to their own devices. It is establishing some best practices that create a culture of empowerment within the organization.
Here is how we drive empowerment at enreap:
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Creating the space to make mistakes
What is the most important thing to drive creativity and innovation in an organization? Tools, technology, resources, etc. are some of the most common responses. While this is true, we believe that the most important thing that organizations need to give people is the space to make mistakes and fail safely.
Edison said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” Unless we are willing to fail and make mistakes we are not going to move along the path of progress.
As such, our company culture focuses on creating a safe environment where people are encouraged to explore their ideas and try and take them to fruition. We know that not all good ideas will become successful, but to get to that one good idea, many must fail.
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Employee say matters
Unidirectional communication cannot fuel organizational success. Just like the organization communicates to the employees, having established channels of communication to make sure employees feel heard are now critical.
We encourage our employees to provide regular, honest feedback and air any concerns or grievances that they might have. Our team leaders, managers, and leadership engage regularly with the employees to ensure continuous performance management and issue resolution.
enreap provides an emotionally mature, non-judgmental, supportive, psychologically safe, and inclusive work environment to our employees that make them feel seen and heard. This has a significant impact on employee engagement levels and ensures that everyone thrives in the workplace.
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Constant Support for Growth
As the rules of engagement change with the onset of the hybrid work environment, organizations need to work harder to engage employees and prepare them for success. With no water cooler conversations or open doors to walk into, creating mechanisms that provide help and support for employee growth becomes a critical enabler of employee empowerment.
While our open, accessible, and transparent work environment plays an important role to provide everyday support to our employees, we also have dedicated mentors who help our team members can reach out to in case they need help or assistance.
Our mentor ecosystem includes our organizational experts and leaders who capably guide employees to create their pathways to success. There are many examples of employees reaching out to mentors to discuss their growth plans and identify the pathways to reach these goals.
We have, at all times, enabled our employees with the right resources, training, or external certifications to help them gain the knowledge and confidence they needed to succeed.
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Create a community
Organizations that focus on employee empowerment are laser-focused on creating an environment of belonging and camaraderie. Today, organizations have to do the same but in a hybrid environment.
As the mental health crisis deepens across the globe, at enreap, we feel that the ownership to create psychologically safe spaces where people form strong, genuine connections with each other rests with us. For this, we have created an environment where collaboration and commitment are the default norm, interactions are authentic, and people can bring their whole selves to work.
We work consistently to eliminate silos that impede clear collaboration and communication between colleagues. Instead, we aim to create a healthy and holistic environment where people reach out to each other for information, feedback, or co-creation, irrespective of their rank, or position in the organizational hierarchy.
A sense of community within the organization drives employee empowerment and creates widespread collaboration across an organization. These are essential enablers of organizational success, especially as problems and managing change are both becoming increasingly complex. Complex problems require multiple perspectives. When there is a strong community of supporters within the organization and employees are empowered, the stress and anxiety that come with disruption and change automatically go down.
In Conclusion
Employee empowerment for us is all about creating environments that empower employees and needs real work from all levels of the organization. It demands that leaders are authentic, approachable, and available.
It needs managers to embrace trust and vulnerability and engage in greater dialogue and build strong cross-functional & multi-level relationships.
It needs employees to have strong levels of ownership, develop a love for learning, prioritize collaboration over competition, and have an entrepreneurial mindset that allows them to try, fail, and try again. And it depends on the organization to enable all of this.
Employee empowerment is not a top-down activity for us at enreap. It is about creating a space that allows employees to contextualize their own experiences of empowerment and enable them to do their best work.
