Companies and organization see employees as one of its resources. To achieve company’s goal, the employer always strategize the workers to gain maximum efficiency. One of the ideas to meet this ambition in through empowering workers. Ettorre (1997) defines empowerment as employees having autonomous decision making capabilities and acting as partners in the business, all with an eye on the bottom line.
The essential of empowering workers is to get the best out of workers. With the concept, workers will work with different mentality, rather than just coming to office from 9-5 and do what ever being told, empowering workers encourage enterprising at executing tasks as well as treating employees as an asset to deliver best performance to drive the organization to its mission.
Caudron (1995, p. 34) provides the following characteristics of an organization’s environment that supports empowered employees:
- The workplace has established self-directed teams.
- Superiors freely share information about the company’s directions and goals with the entire employee base.
- Employees receive training needed to achieve goals, whether specific work skills or educational issues, such as time management or leadership.
- Employees continually develop new work skills.
- Managers understand and respect the challenges of an empowering workplace by performing more as coaches instead of bosses. They empower gradually and systematically as team members are ready and do not expect or push for immediate results.
- Employees are in control of the resources needed to meet their goals.
- The company provides measurements to ensure idea effectiveness of the teams.
- Team members are treated to continual positive feedback and reinforcement.
With this idea, another approach may be done in order to make the workers and their working environment at best potential to gain maximum result.
