Anduze: Empowering your Employees

Empowering Your Employees to Be Great

Todd Anduze Area Director UGASBDC at UWG

How can the business owners lead, inspire, and empower their employees to be great?  That’s an interesting question in today’s fast-moving, highly competitive business environment that seems to be having employee turnover steadily increasing in recent years.  How do company’s like Google or Verizon lead the way in not only attracting extremely talented employees but also keeping them?    

These companies instill in their workforce a level of commitment and company loyalty that other industries have been trying to duplicate for a long time.  For one their managers try to inspire employees to want to succeed, to want the company to succeed, and that’s what leadership development and employee empowerment is all about.  Ways to get your employees to strive to be better and want to come to work every day. 

Employee empowerment has been defined in many ways but generally means the process of allowing employees to have input and control over their work, and the ability to openly share suggestions and ideas about their work and the organization as a whole.

The path that a small business owner or manager can take to employee empowerment is pretty simple.  They can institute practices that will help employees feel confident, capable and in control of their work.  It helps to ensure the employees are committed to our mission and core values of the company.

The purpose of empowering employees is for one, it teaches the employee how to improve, what skills they lack and guides them where they need to become stronger more effective.  Two, it helps managers to know how things are going too, and ways to help the employees with their development.  It also keeps the grapevine from having too much misinformation where it becomes counterproductive, instead helps form a better relationship between the employee and supervisor.  In other words, empowering your employees save you money, and leads you to success.

Employee empowerment can only happen when people prove they can do the job and they display the proper initiative. What this boils down to is that management allows people to make decisions about their work, within certain guidelines.  They also allow employees them to think for themselves, also within certain guidelines.

It can also only happen when we take the archaic notion that business decisions need to be made from the top down.  This sort of decision making excludes lower level employees that may have extremely important ideas on the development and implementation of policies.  It allows employees to have a say in how things are managed and gives them a buy-in to any new changes.

Business owners and managers should always be looking for ways to improve the business and taking the time to develop the team will help them to lead, inspire, and empower their employees to new levels of excellence.