Empowering Employees

How to Empower Employees

As a leader, knowing how to motivate, inspire and empower your employees is one of the most vital aspects of your job. Many employees in your organization might have the potential to expand their abilities and do more, but they lack the resources or authority to implement it, which can leave them feeling frustrated and disengaged.

Luckily, any organization can empower its employees by giving them the resources and responsibility to make decisions and solve work-related problems. Below, we’ll review some of the top benefits of empowering your employees to promote improved work performance and how you can implement this confidence in your business.

5 Ways to Empower Employees

Now that you know the importance of employee empowerment, it’s critical to provide them with the tools they need to continue to be the most valuable asset to your organization. You will need to implement specific strategies that focus on their individual and career growth.

With a learning management system, you can analyze data, track progress and assign new modules to each employee as they reach new goals and set new objectives throughout their ongoing training.

Let’s look at five ways you can empower your employees and how you can incorporate these steps with an LMS.

1. Set Clear Expectations and Goals
   
   The best way to make a good first impression is by preparing your employees from the first moment they join your organization. Define clear expectations and boundaries of their roles and responsibilities within your company. By outlining expectations, you’ll make your employees more comfortable working independently. Likewise, they will be more confident in their abilities and ensure every choice they make aligns with your company values, mission and goals.

   During your onboarding or training process, identify specific goals to give your employees a direct path to work toward concrete outcomes. Discuss what team members will be doing in their roles instead of listing general skills and responsibilities. Ensure your presentation or orientation contains plenty of useful, valuable and actionable information for employees to understand their role in your business. Some examples of well-defined techniques include:

   • Describing the expected responsibilities and outcomes for each position during their first 90 days.
   • Discussing what a typical day looks like for your organization.
   • Talking about why the expected employee outcomes relate to your company’s values.
   • Conveying what each employee should focus on and how it contributes to the organization’s strategies.
   • Emphasizing transparent communication and a supportive environment.

   With a learning management system, your employees will have direct instructions and know how to meet expectations without anxiety or uncertainty. LMS modules and activities will provide examples to work from, creating a solid foundation for job duties. No matter what role you are training staffers for, it’s critical to ensure a smooth onboarding process with a system that helps them build their confidence from their very first day.

   If your employees are uncertain about where your company is heading and how they can contribute to the overall impact on your organization, you will lose productivity and leave your employees feeling lost or confused. It’s your job to show employees how you want to move forward and what they can do at each step to guide themselves to those goals.

   Emphasizing objectives and key results you want to see in your business are also effective tools for employees and will help them take action because they know what they’re working toward. Every quarter, you can review these objectives and progress in the LMS and determine what worked and what didn’t. You can also improve communication within your organization and encourage employees to suggest ideas or even better objectives moving forward.

   By defining mission-critical elements of your company ahead of time, you can provide clarity to your employees and help them feel motivated in their individual success and that of the organization.

2. Give Constructive, Helpful Feedback
    
   As a leader, a critical component of enabling your team to do their best work and feel confident in their roles is delivering honest feedback about their performance.

   Employees will internalize and implement your feedback, so make sure it’s constructive. Use your words wisely and ensure your feedback will help them learn how to grow and do better. While it’s critical to point out areas where they can improve, no employee wants to feel like you are scolding them or singling them out for failing to complete a task or meet an objective.

   Try focusing on feedback that motivates your employees to reach new heights and give them specific, actionable examples of how they can satisfy those goals. For instance, you can share a personal story of when you’ve taken on a challenging task or describe a time when you had to learn how to do something differently.

   Every worker wants to feel appreciated for a job well done, but generic praise doesn’t give them a specific direction for what they should continue doing or what they can improve in their actions or attitude. Here are some tips to remember to boost their motivation:

   • Describe how their successes impacted your organization.
   • Be precise when providing feedback.
   • Always highlight positive aspects of your employees’ strengths.
   • Avoid giving negative feedback too often.

   By sharing your examples, you can show them you care about their progress and advancement as an individual and as part of your team. Constructive feedback also enables employees to control their growth through training and learning opportunities. When giving feedback, you can also reap the benefits of an LMS by discussing an employees’ progress through their training and providing instruction on how they can improve.

3. Support Growth Opportunities
   
   Learning and growth opportunities allow employees to further their skills and leadership throughout their careers and build toward bigger goals. These opportunities can fuel their empowerment, particularly with specific tools that will enable them to take control of their training and boost their knowledge even further. To help your team members grow in their roles, encourage them to take advantage of professional development through an LMS that allows them to take control of their accreditation.

   With an LMS, you and your team can benefit from multiple learning formats and paths that provide tools for your employees to enhance their skills or gain a certification for a piece of equipment they want to learn to use. Using a skills gap analysis, you can also zero in on knowledge gaps, misunderstandings and missed training requirements to ensure all employees can take the appropriate action to complete these steps.

   An LMS such as ISOtrain also provides several versatile training features that allow you to collect data and information on your employees’ growth, such as their:

   • Modules
   • Certificates
   • Activities
   • Progress
   • Prerequisites

   Once they complete the required steps, you can generate reports to gather further insights and guide employees looking for career growth.

   With an LMS, you can quickly identify an employee’s needs by determining what skills they should have by a specific time, while tracking and recording their current capabilities. These software features allow you to ensure competency and compliance in employee training for many industry regulations and empower your team to continuously improve themselves and reach for new goals.

   Without consistent training or new objectives, your employees may become too comfortable in their position and lose motivation or ambition. An LMS allows every team member to:

   • Refresh their training.
   • Learn new skills.
   • Obtain certifications that build their knowledge.
   • Enhance their ability to take on new roles and responsibilities.

   No matter how your employees are furthering their careers, your support will help them feel more valued and confident in their jobs.

4. Let Employees Take Control
   
   In any business, leaders should delegate tasks to your employees and let them learn how to problem-solve in different situations. Giving your team members room to figure out how to fix an issue allows them to use their autonomy, resources and creativity to maximize their abilities. Managers and team leaders can give employees a sense of ownership with dedicated tasks, empowering them to take an active role in leading and learn how to become a self-starter in other ways.

   Letting your employees take control is also critical for avoiding micromanaging, which is one of the most frustrating aspects of leadership for employees. According to one report from Harvard Business School, overbearing leaders are among the top three causes of employees leaving a job. Micromanaging also causes:

   • Higher stress
   • Demoralization
   • Reduced creativity
   • Increased employee turnover
   • Lower morale

   The same Harvard report also indicated 55% of employees with micromanaging leadership felt it diminished their productivity. Trusting your team to do more things within their capabilities and giving them extra control over tasks allows them to practice new skills and avoid boredom with their routine or work dynamic. Putting your team members in charge can also help them discover new roles they’d like to work toward.

   

   In your organization, you can use an LMS to put this into practice by giving employees more control over their training and certifications. You can assign specific modules to team members who wish to work toward larger organizational initiatives.

   Providing this individual control over their careers can even boost their enthusiasm for the task or role as they see their progress, increasing the likelihood that they will do their job quickly and efficiently. When they can learn independently, they will soon gain the knowledge they need to feel confident in their roles and eventually pursue leadership positions.

5. Provide the Right Resources
   
   As a manager or leader, you must create the right conditions and environment for your employees and teach them how to use your internal resources effectively. Your employees need access to the right tools to be productive and do their job. These tools and resources could include:

   • Support from your team.
   • Employee recognition.
   • Time management exercises.
   • Encouragement to embrace risk-taking and curiosity.
   • Using an LMS to fuel empowerment.

   As you begin implementing employee empowerment practices, your team should know what they have available to them so they can learn how to solve problems independently and take the initiative to try new things. If you provide resources such as an LMS, but don’t encourage your employees to use them, they may not grow outside their comfort zones.

   Likewise, the more freedom you give your team members, the less likely they will question every choice they make. Over time, they will increase their competency and confidence in their roles as they feel more capable because of the knowledge and skills they can strengthen through these assets.

   A valuable strategy in any business is to create individual development plans so employees can fulfill their ambition and potential on their time. ISOtrain LMS is an excellent resource to define skills gaps and gain more actionable and measurable results your employees can use to improve their performance. Training on the job with an LMS provides many benefits that can also lead to better company culture and increased retention.

   An LMS also acts as a self-paced training program, allowing your team members to take ownership of on-demand learning and rely on the resources they need to improve productivity.