What is the true key to employee motivation? Is it setting targets and rewards? Is it offering high pay and other benefits? Or is it all about how you trust and treat your employees?

There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that it’s the latter option. Employees feel happier working for a company when they are trusted and praised. And a great way to do this is not through words, but through actions – particularly giving employees autonomy to make decisions and showing them that they’re valuable.

This is a strategy known as ‘employee empowerment’. Instead of trying to control every aspect of your employees, this strategy involves giving them the resources they need to act independently. Better still, you can actively encourage them to suggest business improvements and determine the future of the company.

Instead of acting as a dictator and treating your employees as your minions, this approach involves treating employees as your business partners and managing your business as a collective. 

Just what are some effective ways to empower your employees? This post lists a few steps that can help you to embrace employee empowerment in order to build a more motivated and productive team.

Say no to micromanaging

Micromanaging is the opposite of employee empowerment. It involves trying to control every minor decision that your employees make by monitoring each of them closely. Many employees think that micromanaging can help reduce mistakes, however it can often end up having the opposite effect due to the extra pressure placed on each employee. Micromanaging is also exhausting for you as an employer because it means having to spend so much more time monitoring employees. 

If you’re constantly hovering over employees’ desks or demanding frequent updates and reports or demanding to be CC’d in every email, it could be a sure sign that you’re a micromanager. Instead, try actively taking a backseat and see how your employees get on without your supervision. Ask for updates, but try to reduce the frequency by which you do it. You could find that not breathing down your employees’ neck actually reduces errors and improves progress.

Offload some of your admin

Many micromanagers also find it hard to delegate. You could find yourself taking on lots of roles that your employees are equally capable of doing with some minor training. This could include admin roles like responding to emails, answering the phone, hosting routine meetings with clients, ordering stock and quoting prices.

Offloading some of this admin can be a way of reducing your workload, however it can also be a way of empowering your employees by trusting them with these tasks. Giving employees the tools they need to do these tasks independently could also reduce delays and boost business in some cases. For example, adopting field service quoting software and allowing your employees to give price quotes to employees could lead to faster quotes and help you to win over more business.

Just make sure that you are not burdening already overworked employees with more tasks. Employees will not see this as empowerment and may resent you more for it unless you are willing to up their pay. 

Take the time to train and educate employees

Before employees can be trusted to run things independently or take on extra duties, you need to be sure that they are trained and educated enough. Micromanaging becomes necessary when employees aren’t proficient enough to carry out tasks without supervision. By investing time into training employees until they are proficient, you can prevent the need to supervise.

Thorough training should be provided for all brand new employees. Creating an onboarding plan in which you dedicate time for training can ensure that employees are trained up in all necessary areas. The likes of e-learning can meanwhile allow employees to learn tasks and protocols independently, although it shouldn’t be a replacement for in-person training.

It’s worth continuing to train and educate longstanding employees so that they can take on more responsibilities. On top of offering training yourself, it could be worth paying for courses and workshops so that your employees can learn new skills and industry knowledge – which could include skills and knowledge that you yourself don’t possess.

The opportunity to constantly learn new things and build skills will provide employees with a sense of progression in their careers, as well as enabling them to constantly improve their quality of work.

Produce a detailed handbook

Handbooks are a useful tool to have. They can help to provide information on how to carry out various tasks within a business – which could include everything from what to do in a fire to how to order new stock.

If an employee has forgotten how to carry out a task, they can refresh their memory by reading the handbook instead of having to ask you or another employee. This can empower employees to independently take on tasks they may otherwise need to seek help for, reducing mistakes while also reducing time spent assisting employees. 

A handbook needs to be located somewhere that employees can easily access it. Many companies have not started creating digital handbooks that can be accessed as a file on a computer or even as a mobile app.

Such handbooks can be more updated regularly with more ease, and are less likely to get damaged or lost. You can also upload videos to them to provide detailed visual demonstrations of tasks. 

Hire employees with skills/knowledge you lack

As an employer, you do not have to be a jack of all trades. There may be areas of running a business that you don’t truly understand or are just not good at such as marketing, IT or accounting.

Rather than spending huge amounts of time to educate yourself in these areas, it may actually be more sensible to hire employees who already have the knowledge you lack. They can then take over these tasks and do them to a better standard than yourself – which will lead to a more efficiently run business.

This does mean that you have to be content with hiring employees who may be more knowledgeable than you in certain areas. It also means that you’ll be forced to let employees work more autonomously because you physically won’t be able to take over their roles. However, it can also ensure that each employee is a valuable member of the team. More importantly, each member will feel truly valued.

On top of hiring employees with these existing skills, you can train up employees who may be eager to specialise in certain areas. For example, if you run a restaurant and a waiter shows an enthusiasm for wine, you could pay for them to take a sommelier course and make them your restaurant’s wine expert – potentially even letting them choose new wines for the menu and manage stock of these wines. 

Ask employees for feedback

A good employer listens to their employees – including their praises and their complaints – and uses this to help influence improvements within the business. However, you shouldn’t just wait for employees to approach you with their concerns. By actively feedback, you can make employees feel more comfortable opening up.

There are many ways to ask your employees for feedback. You can host team meetings or pose questions to group chats to get people’s opinions on certain subjects. Alternatively, you can message individual employees privately or arrange one-on-one meetings for giving feedback. 

By welcoming even negative feedback, you can prevent employees from finding other harmful ways to vent their frustration such as forming cliques against management or leaving negative reviews on sites like Glassdoor.

Just make sure that you are truly acknowledging employee complaints and trying to act upon them. For example, if employees are complaining about the wi-fi constantly cutting out, make sure to actively look into ways of improving the wi-fi.

Involve employees in big company decisions

One of the best ways to empower employees is to involve them in big company decisions. This should particularly include decisions that will greatly affect your employees such as choosing a new uniform or redecorating a breakroom.

However, you may also be able to involve employees in more general company decisions such as helping to look for new recruits, coming up with new marketing strategies, upgrading company equipment or even exploring new products and services.

The more involved your team is with company decisions, the more they will care about the future of your company and the harder they will work to make it a success. This doesn’t mean that you have to cast every company decision to a team vote. However, you should always consider the impact of decisions on your team, and welcome input when you think it could make a difference. 

Reward those who find creative solutions

Finally, you should consider actively encouraging autonomy – not just by letting employees solve certain problems on their own, but by rewarding these solutions when they show a clear level of ingenuity. 

Praise a simple way to reward problem solving. But don’t just praise employees in private – praise them in front of their colleagues and in front of customers. If it’s a solution to a recurring problem, you could even encourage employees to follow the same solution and make it part of company protocol.

You could also give away end-of-year awards to those that go above and beyond to solve problems. These could be accompanied by monetary bonuses or offers like extra paid holiday. 

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