5 Ways to Empower Employees at Your Company

Organizations thrive when employees have the resources, motivation, and confidence to make decisions, complete even the most difficult tasks, and innovate along the way. This is what employee empowerment is all about.

Get started empowering employees and reaping the rewards of a happy, engaged workforce with these five effective steps:

1. Foster an environment of trust and psychological safety

Gathering employee input is essential to corporate leadership as they strive to make critical decisions and equip their workforces to conquer new challenges and responsibilities. However, employees are often timid when it comes to expressing opinions, concerns, and struggles. But leaders can help their workers open up by establishing trust.?

Organizations build this trust and empower employees when their leaders consistently align words with actions. Trust in the workplace is closely linked to a feeling of psychological safety, a sense of security that comes from knowing leaders and other team members always have your back. When organizations encourage psychological safety , employees are more likely to provide honest input and suggest new, innovative ideas, confident that their coworkers will give them a fair shake.

2. Build employee confidence with recognition and incentives

Even the most self-motivated employees can be plagued by self-doubts, especially when their managers don’t typically go out of their way to commend their hard work. And when these rockstars are kudos-deficient, they’ll struggle to maintain the energy and confidence needed to problem solve, innovate, and grow over the long haul. Which is why it’s incredibly important to appreciate their contributions!

Of course, it can be trickier to commend a job well done in remote environments. Luckily, whether your workforce is in-office, fully remote, or somewhere in between, you can empower every team member to recognize each other frequently, from the C-suite on down, with an employee reward and recognition platform. Software that includes organization-wide channels for social recognition — with commenting and image-sharing capabilities — makes it easy and fun for everyone to start showing appreciation. And you can make moments of recognition genuinely memorable with a platform that lets all employees give out and redeem reward points from a vast, built-in catalog of exciting gifts and experiences.

3. Offer flexibility in employees’ work arrangements

Many workers feel the empowerment that comes when employers enable them to work how, when and where they want. And, when employees can structure their jobs around their lives, this empowerment extends beyond the workplace to personal wellness. In turn, companies have seen how improved employee wellness can play a major role in organizational success.

The best part? Implementing organizational policies that ensure employees can choose where and when they work (within reason) is simple! As an example, coming into the office an hour later likely won’t make or break performance and productivity, but it will enable a team member to attend to personal responsibilities that would hang over their head otherwise.

4. Ask for employee feedback – and act on it

Managers and other leaders should seek feedback from employees in both individual and group settings. However, employees often have thoughts to share when no one is available. And there will be things employees don’t feel comfortable discussing in-person, even with the most supportive manager.

So, organizations should provide opportunities for team members to share feedback anonymously, like targeted, easy-to-answer pulse surveys and AI-powered HR chatbots . In addition, these employee engagement solutions should help people managers analyze feedback quickly and guide them from insight to action .

5. Support professional growth with coaching and delegation

Leaders should strive to act as coaches , and focus on how to empower employees to achieve their goals. Centering discussions on concrete objectives makes it much easier to build action plans and promote mentorship. This supportive approach encourages employees to reflect on what they want to accomplish and develop the required skills, turning to their manager whenever they need a helping hand.

Managers shouldn’t be afraid to delegate additional responsibilities to employees, either. Find out what team members are really interested in, give them some responsibilities to match, and provide them with the training, resources, and encouragement they need to handle them successfully. Delegation fosters a sense of trust and makes employees more eager to seek out new challenges, instead of falling into an unproductive rut.