Article Summary

‘The Power of Empowerment’ is an article written by Karl Sharicz. In this article she has defined

the importance of empowerment for success of business. How it can alter the work environment

and thus bring the business at highest rank. She says the concept of empowerment is based on the

idea of providing an employee with the resources, opportunity, authority and motivation to do his

work as well as holding him accountable for his actions. This will make an employee happy and

more proficient. An emerging concept in population these days is that many companies or

organizations claim to be customer centric. This significantly means they are claiming to having

changed a business from one that in the past primarily used to focus on services and products, to

the one that today values customers and their experiences above all. In the article it has been shown

through studies that when an employee feels empowered, he is better at delivering to customer

expectations and in process are usually more engaged, satisfied and often become more productive.

Course Topic Integration

The selected course topic is ‘Empowerment’ and the selected article is ‘The Power of

Empowerment’. Both the titles indicate that they are interrelated. The same concept revolves

around both that empowerment must be given to employees, so that they can perform better and

in this way the relationship between employee and workers will grow stronger. This in turn will

help in the success of business. People having right skills as well as positive attitude are usually

hired and properly on-boarded and trained in whatever knowledge and skills they can be lacking,

that at least builds the foundation of empowerment. Lets think about how many times we have

encountered a poor and unacceptable customer experience and how empowered was the person

we were dealing with to solve our issue quickly? Leaving us satisfied with the resolution? In most
of the cases, they wanted to escalate the issue to manager or worse, pass us on to someone else.

Poor customer experiences are often driven by lack of empowerment.

Views and Opinions

Empowerment is an exemplary step that should be practiced in every workplace. This can help to

assure better work place and safe future. Companies must try to put the same effort to take care of

their employees as they take care of their customers. When an issue occurs or even when

transactions take place, a company wants its customers to attain and derive value from what they

are aiming for (Effectiveness), make the procedure easy for them so they can obtain it (Ease), and

in the end the company wants them feel positive about transaction or resolution (Emotion). Lack

of proper and well-articulated empowerment plan will hinder the process the process to accomplish

it. Every organization or firm is different and the extent to which employees can be empowered to

deliver on this will also vary. Probably the most important employee empowerment needs that

leaders hand over some power of their own so that they can install some autonomy, sense of

responsibility, and accountability within those who report to them.

Proper empowerment is attained when expectations of employees are met as well as aligned with

expectations of those they report to and where there exists a strong relationship between leader

and subordinate. Different ways should be considered through which empowerment can be

attained. The different kind of impacts that may have on the brand, future business outcomes and

customer experiences must also be considered.

Reference:

https://www.business2community.com/strategy/the-power-of-empowerment-02251252