EMPOWERMENT

Empowerment means encouraging and allowing individuals to take personal responsibility for improving the way they do their jobs and contribute to the organisational goals.  It require creation of a culture which would encourage people at all levels to feel that they can make a difference and also help them to acquire the confidence and skills to do so.  The famous example of empowerment is Total Quality Management which is an employee driven process for ensuring best possible quality products and services for the satisfaction of customer.

TQM empower employee at all levels in order to tape their full creativity, motivation and commitment.  The other practices which encourage employee involvement includes suggestion system, job enlargement, job enrichment, quality circle, self managed team, participative leadership etc.

Empowerment brings about far reaching change in the organisation. Its essence leads to development of mature human resources, effective communication, and readiness for change and an atmosphere of trust in the organisation.

Implication of empowerment

From	To
Fear Learning is a responsibility People take little initiative Scant training and development Avoiding change Feedback is seen as criticism Training and development is the responsibility of personnel Lack of vision Problem avoiding Closed communication Suspicion	Challenge and adventure Learning is an adventure People solve their own problems Continuous development Change welcomed Feed back is seen as essential Training and development is everybody’s responsibility Strong, focused, and share vision Problem solving Open Communication Sharing of information Sharing of ideas Sharing of skills Trust

Thus many responsibilities have been shifted from managers to work groups in the form of employee empowerment. Companies with the culture of empowerment reflect the following features:

• Everyone in the organisation is valued and encouraged to make personal contribution.
• Individuals are constantly aware, not only of what they are seeking to achieve, but also why they are seeking to achieve it and how it fits with the wider corporate goals.
• The culture is likely to be cooperative and purposeful rather than towards finding faults
• Individuals have a real willingness to take personnel responsibility for their own success, the success of the team in which they work and the organisation as a whole.

The significance of empowerment of workers and groups arises because of the following factors:

• Increasing pace of change, turbulence of environment and the changing expectations of customers require a speed and flexibility of response which is incompatible with the old style command and control model or organisational functioning.
• Organisations are using new types of structures to achieve their objectives.  The impact of down sizing, de-layering and decentralizing means that the old methods of achieving coordination and control are no longer appropriate. Achieving performance under these circumstances require that staff take and exercise much greater responsibility.
• Organisation requires cross functional working and greater integration in their process if they are to meet the customer needs. Such cooperation can be achieved through empowerment.
• Employees now have greater awareness and are more concerned with the satisfaction of higher level needs.  Empowerment can be used to satisfy such needs of employees and thus motivate them.
• Employees now have greater awareness and are more concerned with the satisfaction of higher level needs.  Empowerment can be used to satisfy such needs of employees and thus motivate them.
• Empowerment provides opportunities to the lower level to develop their competencies.  Thus it can be used as source of managerial talent for the organisation.

Dynamic concept of Empowerment

• Total Quality Management

TQM  refers to meeting the requirement of customer consistently by continuous improvement in the quality of work of all employees. For achieving TQM these three things are essential

Meeting customer’s requirements

Continuous improvement through management process

Involvement of all employees

• Quality Circle

A quality circle is a small group of employees doing similar work or related work who meet regularly to identify, analyse and solve product quality problems and to improve general operations

            Overall improvement in quality product

            Improvement of production method and productivity

            Self development of employees

            Encouragement of innovative ideas among the employee

To build up a high morale and team spirit in the organisation’s atmosphere and among the employees.

The concepts deals with empowerment

• Total quality management
• Quality circle
• Business process reengineering
• Restructuring

Total quality management

It refers to meeting the requirements of customers consistently by continuous improvement in the quality of work of all employee. For achieving total quality three things are essential.

• Meeting customer requirements
• Continuous improvement through management process
• Involvement of all employees.

Quality Circle

It is a small group of employee doing similar or related work who meet regularly to identify, analyse and solve product quality problem and to improve general operations.

Business Process reengineering

The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvement in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed.

Restructuring

An enterprise to determine its core competencies and decide in which are it should continue to operate and diversity and which sectors it should get out.