How to Empower Your Employees?
Employee empowerment is one of the best and most important methods you can use to motivate your employees and foster growth within your organization. By choosing to empower your employees, you are using a key to open a door to incredible opportunities to improve customer service. Leveraging the power of highly motivated employees is a great strategy that enables you to help those employees make better decisions which benefits them, as well as your organization.
So, you see, employee empowerment is really a wonderful tool. However, it's not often that businesses know how to implement it properly. These tips can help:
Embrace a New Culture
The traditional corporate hierarchy gets in the way of a quick, streamlined, decision-making process. Welcoming a new culture that allows for employees to make decisions on their own, based on their training and capabilities means that the traditional process needs to be changed. These changes might be challenging at first, but will render great results in the long run.
Your Mission, Vision, and Values Should be Front and Center
For employees to be motivated and empowered, they first need to understand and align with the company's values, mission, and vision. Once they understand that and, if they agree with it, they will feel compelled to do what's in their power to help the company meet its goals and expectations. Instead of having a bunch of employees working individually, you'll have a group of collaborators working toward the same objective, who have your back.
Teach Your Employees How to Make Decisions That Benefit the Company
Many companies think they're empowering their employees by just telling them to make decisions, but eventually the hierarchy gets in the way, because they always have to consult with their managers first. A decision framework is about motivating your employees to make a decision when they're confident that the output will benefit the company, but when they're lacking confidence, that's when they should talk to someone else and get approval before moving forward.
Empowering your employees is not about leaving them unsupervised and letting them run with every idea they might have. It's about allowing them to be confident in their capabilities and knowledge so that they feel free to make good decisions when they have the tools for it, and when they know those decisions align with the company's expectations.
When you own an independent insurance agency, to run a successful operation, you don't need to make every single decision yourself. Instead of micromanaging, hire and train capable staff, and then empower them to make great decisions that help propel your business forward.