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Good Doctor,
How do I go about to establish the main enablers to empower my workers to the shop floor?
Signed,
Ann Enabler
Dear Enabler:
Empowerment comes with information, skills, power to act, and motivation. Those with power, of course, can create the enabling conditions for an empowered workforce, but they can not mandate empowerment or create empowerment by quick-fix training. Some workplaces have given statistical training and seen the stacks of computer printouts pile up with no payoff.
Empowerment for workers, in my experience, is generated by management-labor conversations about the mission of delivering quality in their work, their frustrations related to high performance, the threats of competition and opportunities, blockages of waste and need for cycle reduction.
On the shop floor, super-graphic slogans such as PRIDE IN PRODUCT won't help create empowered workers unless it is they who have the slogans painted as part of the daily postings of days of safe work, products going out the door, sales figures, etc. This conversation is not simply informal, but must be a collaborative effort between labor leaders and management. Trial baloons and preliminary discussion should begin plant-wide, or department-wide if that is the place where you have the power yourself, to begin.
Superiors must know what is going on. The old saw of walk-the-talk means superiors who are there and circulate among the workforce as servants whose job it is to help make their workers' jobs more effective. The role of management is to create a knowlegeable business-wise worker, who understands what makes for profit and the overhead costs of his/her workplace. Thus, the training which should result from the formal discussions between management and labor will include finance for non-financial workers, down to earth information about costs and profits.
Then team building will follow if the workers see their efforts matching their pay both in the short run and in the longer haul, such as in gain-sharing, employee stock ownership, and/or bonuses. And learning to function as a team also takes coaching, patience, and persistence.
Motivation happens naturally when those in power share their power and are generous in sharing the rewards of an enpowered workplace.
I hope that these thoughts provide some ideas to add to your own about how empowerment can happen where you work.
WEGO pays off for those who share power. Do keep me posted on what you do.
--Bill Gorden
Dear Bill,
Thank you very much for your answer to my quetion on empowerment. I have decided to start by doing a literature study on empowerment to get as much info as possible and then to do a benchmarking excercise inside and outside our company to see where other people stand with empowerment. I am also busy compiling a quetionnaire to establish levels of empowerment and all the factors that influence it in a specific area. Do you have any comments or suggestions on such a questionnaire?
Ann Enabler
Hello Again
Enabler:
The best starting source I know regarding a lit search and questionnaire is Gretchen Spreitzer's (1995) work "Psychological empowerment in the workplace: Dimensions, measurement, and validation." Academy of Management Journal, 38, 1442-1465.
Spreitzer's 12 item questionnaire measures the four dimensions of Meaning, Competence, Impact, and Self-Determination. Dan West and I used this questionnaire as part of our study of teams reported on the ASK THE WORKPLACE DOCTOR website. Read that to get a good beginning for your lit search.
The risk of administering a questionnaire is that employees' expectations may be raised and if there is no plan for responding promptly to their concerns, cynism will grow rather than empowerment.
WEGO builds on what has gone before us.