I Am Employee, Hear Me Roar
Most large American corporations have tried to give employees more control over their jobs, but only a fraction of workers touched by empowerment efforts have the tools necessary to make them work.
Employers are increasingly turning to total quality management, teams and other employee involvement programs to re-energize a work force stretched to its limits by the downsizing and belt tightening that characterized re-engineering efforts of the early 1990s.
While participatory management fads have cycled in and out of the business world since the 1930s, giving employees more say in how they do their work is a necessity today for businesses looking both to compete in the global marketplace and to keep pace with domestic competitors.
In theory, empowered employees have the power to make decisions on their own to help them please customers and build better products. But in reality, these programs are stymied by traditional bureaucratic management styles that still dominate U.S. companies.
This disconnect between theory and reality is apparent in firms across America where employees guffaw at “Dilbert” comics that parody the “do more with less” mantra common in so many workplaces, while managers think they are breaking down old cultures and creating a collaborative environment.
“Empowerment is a concept still more talked about than practiced,” said Ed Lawler, a professor of research and director of the Center for Effective Organizations at USC.
“Managers think they are giving employees freedom and discretion and control, but often that’s not the fact.”
Of the 85% of employees in major U.S. corporations touched by empowerment programs, only 10% or so have the right mix of knowledge, information, power and rewards necessary to be really involved in their jobs, Lawler said.
Moreover, a typical company uses empowerment programs with between 1% and 20% of its work force, according to a survey of Fortune 1,000 firms Lawler contacted for the book “Creating High Performance Organizations: Practices and Results of Employee Involvement and Total Quality Management in Fortune 1000 Companies,” co-written with Susan Albers Mohrman and Gerald E. Ledford Jr. (Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers).
For employees to achieve their best, the knowledge, information, power and reward systems must be balanced, experts agree. But many managers fail to change old habits, leaving employees mired in a management fad gone bad.
For example, managers are often unwilling to give up control. Others fail to provide their workers with the information they need to make good decisions.
About two-thirds of workers and managers believe a lack of training is a major barrier to good job performance, according to a 1995 study of 1,516 employees and supervisors by Kepner-Tregoe Inc., a Princeton, N.J., consulting firm.
Reward systems and feedback about individual performance are also poor in many instances, the study found. About 40% of the 905 workers who responded to Kepner-Tregoe said they received some kind of reward for a job well done. Similarly, less than half of the 611 managers who returned questionnaires said they give their workers immediate feedback when they have performed well.
The study also emphasized the gap between managers’ and employees’ perceptions: Fewer than half the workers surveyed said the people they work with are glad to be employed by their company, while two-thirds of managers who replied said their workers were happy at their jobs.
The cornerstone of any empowerment program--knowledge of the company’s business and what its goals are--is also less than apparent in many organizations, even to middle managers.
“The only way empowerment really works is to get everyone focused on the problems of the organization,” said Charles Heckscher, a professor of management and labor relations at Rutgers University.
“Employees must know how to analyze a balance sheet. They also must know the company’s strategy, who its competitors are, and its strengths, weaknesses and challenges.”
Empowerment efforts also falter because managers don’t rid their offices of behaviors that disempower employees from the start.
“Often it’s what we can remove that’s getting in employees’ way that leads to increased productivity,” said Charles Vance, a professor of human resource management at Loyola Marymount University and a consultant to firms such as Texaco Inc. and Arthur Andersen & Co.
Disempowering behaviors include condescending treatment, patronizing, questioning an employee’s competence, suggesting ulterior motives, badgering, yelling, interrupting and suggesting the person’s lower status, Vance said.
If managers want to motivate their employees, they should ask them what’s getting in the way of them doing their jobs well, he added.
On the other hand, companies that turn to empowerment programs, while they might not always get them right the first time, usually don’t return to the old way of doing things, experts agree.
When they are effectively managed, systems that give employees more control over their jobs can lead to a 10.3% return on sales, compared with 6.3% among low-use firms, Lawler said.
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Giving workers more training and knowledge of the business can also lead to a 5% increase in productivity, said Ed Montgomery, chief economist at the Labor Department.
For example, Motorola estimates it earns $30 for every $1 invested in employee training. Nordstrom employees, who are allowed to do whatever it takes to delight and keep a customer, can rake in commissions in excess of $100,000 a year. Nordstrom also boasts sales of $400 per square foot, almost double the industry average.
Employees who have the power to choose what their schedules are and how they will do their jobs also have a better attitude about their work, said Nancy Fox, chief executive of the Girl Scouts of Santa Clara County. Fox handed over control of the Girl Scouts’ membership-development department to employees when the unit’s supervisor left six months ago.
“We have seen membership go up, but it’s more the intangibles I’ve noticed,” Fox said.
“It’s the esprit de corps. Individuals on the team tell me they feel more responsible and connected to what they do.”
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Empowerment Tools
Although managers pay lip service to empowerment programs, most have problems implementing them effectively. Some strategies to help empowerment move forward at your firm:
* Commitment: Managers must be 100% committed to ridding their firm of bureaucratic management systems. Supervisors should “get their egos out of it” and be willing to risk giving decision-making power to employees.
* Participation: Employees and supervisors must focus on common goals by identifying who the company’s customers are as well as what satisfies them. Each employee should have a well-defined role in the organization.
* Measurement: Supervisors must review employees’ progress toward common goals such as how many customers were served, what they purchased, how many units each employee manufactured, etc.
* Communication: Administrators should encourage employees to participate in informal problem-solving meetings throughout the day to discuss goals, management systems and employees’ roles.
* Error tolerance: Managers should not punish employees for honest mistakes, but allow them to learn from them. Employees must have a sense that managers trust their judgment.
* Incentives: Managers must provide both material incentives such as salaries and bonuses and psychological incentives such as praising an employee publicly for good performance.
Source: Ed Lawler, professor of research and director of the Center for Effective Organizations at USC; Harold Weinstein, chief operating officer of Caliper Human Strategies, Princeton, N.J.
Researched by JENNIFER OLDHAM / Los Angeles Times
