When discussing “empowering employees,” we often do so by thinking about their autonomy. For example, if a customer support service agent can provide novel solutions to each client, they can get to the root of an issue being experienced instead of solely following a rigid script.
Yet, in many workspaces, an employee’s opinion is, respectfully, quite meaningless. You might run a restaurant and keep a solid brigade of chefs you’re proud of, but that doesn’t mean they can “have an opinion” on how food is stored and the food hygiene rules. Food must still be refrigerated or frozen at the correct temperatures, hands must be washed, and surfaces must be cleaned.
For this reason, while paradoxical, learning how to empower staff within rigid rules is about finding the areas of autonomy and capability that apply. In this post, we’ll discuss a few methods you can use to achieve that positive outcome:
Table of Contents
Provide Clear Communication
It’s hard to work in any productive environment where you’re never really sure what your operational parameters are. That’s not to say employees thrive when put in a box and never venture out of it, but knowing where the “hard boundaries” are is key when strict rules are present.
For example, a doctor may have the authority to make medical decisions, prescribe medicines, and refer to other departments, but they’re never allowed to break patient confidentiality unless there’s a threat to life. While the stakes may be lower in your team, keeping clear, upfront communication is important. Maybe you undergo a comprehensive cybersecurity audit to meet FDA requirements, and staff need to know how to prepare for it. Making protocol entirely clear is an essential place to begin.
Give Regular Updates To Your Team
The difficulty with strict rules is that sometimes, they can change. For example, a new piece of legislation affecting your industry might completely rewrite how your company meets set guidelines. Or, perhaps you’re taking on a government tender and now have to manage your IT systems within certain cybersecurity management efforts.
Staff cannot feel out of the loop or work on disparate elements of this new policy. They must understand it thoroughly, which sometimes means booking training seminars away from your usual productive capacity.
Effective Reporting Systems
So far we’ve discussed training and regular meetings to connect staff together, but those are hardly the sole tools that assist your management here. It’s easy to think that empowering employees means empowering them as individuals, but if you empower them as a team, then what’s good for the team will be good for them as an individual note within it.
So, for example, having effective reporting systems so that errors can be immediately addressed will ensure the whole team can respond to a mistake without making a staff member feel as though accountability measures will fall on their head if they dare to raise the issue. This allows the team to become more reactive, focused and attentive, as opposed to fearful of consequences if issues are seen. In a system where reticence can cause real issues, you will have made all the difference through that perspective shift.
Fair, Effective Disciplinary Measures
We usually consider disciplinary measures, especially in a strict context, punitive and not helpful to staff satisfaction. We might think of a soldier being reprimanded for not keeping guard where he should have been and being forced to run for a mile as punishment.
But disciplinary measures, at their best, enforce accountability and help support the entire team. For example, if your productive effort is unsafe and requires important understanding of safety mechanisms as well as equipment, being able to identify who failed to preserve safety equipment is essential. That way, you can see how the failings were caused, if the employee responsible was negligent willingly, or if they need further training. That way, you can either replace or improve their performance. It’s not hard to see how over time, these systems can catch flaws that might impact the entire team.
While it doesn’t feel great to be targeted for a mistake you’ve made as an employee, having an issue detected, going through renewed training, and being monitored for improved progress could be the best thing that happened to you in your position. Perhaps it could even prevent you from causing a real safety hazard that harms someone. This, in effect, empowers you, even if it doesn’t feel like it to begin with.
As such, having fair and effective disciplinary measures is key.
With this advice, you’ll be certain to empower your employees in the best possible way.
