Employee Empowerment

Employee empowerment describes how much autonomy and control an organization gives its employees over their day-to-day work. In practice, that might mean giving employees a voice in improving processes, letting them help build and manage new systems, or running smaller teams with less oversight from higher-level management. It also means giving employees the authority, resources, and information they need to make decisions and take action within their own roles, not just the responsibility without the means to act on it.

Done well, empowerment tends to increase productivity and improve the quality of people’s work and work life, because employees feel more ownership over what they do. It usually goes hand in hand with a collaborative, inclusive leadership style, where managers trust their teams enough to let them make decisions that actually matter.