What employee empowerment means
Employee empowerment (تمكين الموظفين) is giving an employee the authority to take decisions within the scope of their work without referring back each time, while the employee bears the consequences of those decisions.
The definition joins two elements. The first is authority: within their scope of work, the employee decides a matter without seeking approval for it. The second is responsibility: the result of a decision taken under that authority is carried by the employee who took it. The definition states the two together, so the authority to decide and the consequence of the decision arrive as one arrangement.
The words “without referring back each time” fix what changes. The employee still works within a defined area, and the decisions concerned are the ones that fall inside that area. What changes is that a decision inside it no longer waits for someone else to approve it before it takes effect.
The pillars of employee empowerment
Employee empowerment does not stand without three pillars. Each of them answers a separate question: what the employee may decide, what the employee decides on, and what happens to the employee after a decision goes wrong.
- A declared authority with limits. It sets out what the employee decides alone, and the point at which the employee refers a matter back. Both halves are part of it: the matters the employee settles without approval, and the limit beyond which a matter goes to someone else. Without a written limit, employee empowerment becomes a test of courage rather than an administrative arrangement. A test of courage leaves the extent of the authority to how far each employee dares to go, whereas an administrative arrangement states that extent in advance and in writing.
- Enough information. Whoever decides needs the information on which the decision is to be taken. Granting the authority to decide while withholding that information amounts to assigning the employee to guess. In that case the authority is present, but the material needed to use it is missing.
- Safety when a mistake is made. An independent decision means a possible mistake. An employee who decides without referring back can decide wrongly, and that possibility comes with the authority itself. If the first mistake leads to the delegation being withdrawn, everyone learns that referring back is the safer course. The lesson is drawn by the whole team, and not only by the employee whose decision went wrong.
Where practice undoes employee empowerment
Employee empowerment can be announced as a culture and undone as a practice. A manager says “decide for yourself”, and then reviews every decision the employee takes, or reverses a decision in front of the team.
In the first case, each decision still passes through the manager after it has been taken. In the second case, the reversal takes place where the rest of the team can see it. Either way, the announcement and the practice send two different signals, and the signal the employee takes from them is the second one, the practice.
For that reason, employee empowerment is measured by what happened to the last decision an employee took that went against their manager’s judgement, and not by what the policy says. A policy states what is intended. The last such decision, and what followed it, shows what is actually practised.
What employee empowerment brings
Employee empowerment brings three benefits.
- Speed of response where a customer is waiting for a simple decision. The customer does not wait while the matter travels to a manager and back, because the employee dealing with the customer is the one who decides it.
- Relief for the manager from decisions that do not need the manager’s level. Those decisions are taken where they arise, and the manager’s time is left for the decisions that do need that level.
- Retention, the outcome tracked by the retention rate, which is the share of the people employed at the start of a period who are still employed at its end. It is a benefit because widening the authority within the same role is directly connected with employee engagement (تفاعل الموظفين). The widening takes place in the role the employee already holds, without a move to another position.
Where employee empowerment does not fit
Not every decision can be delegated. Three kinds of decision keep review as the rule rather than the exception:
- decisions that carry a significant regulatory or financial consequence;
- decisions that touch other people’s data;
- decisions that cannot be reversed.
Good employee empowerment widens the range of ordinary decisions and protects the exceptional ones, rather than treating the two alike. The widening applies to ordinary decisions, which the employee takes without referring back. The protection applies to exceptional decisions, which stay under review. An arrangement that places both kinds under the same rule, whether by reviewing everything or by reviewing nothing, fails to separate them in the way good employee empowerment does.
How employee empowerment differs from delegation
Delegation is the transfer of a particular task, or of a particular authority, from one person to another. It can be temporary, and it can cover a single case.
Employee empowerment is a standing arrangement built into the design of the role itself. The authority is part of the job, not a grant from whoever holds a position.
The difference lies in where the authority comes from. Under delegation, it comes from a person, and it covers what that person has handed over, for as long as the handover lasts. Under employee empowerment, it comes with the role, so it is there for the employee who holds the role, and it does not depend on the person above that role choosing to grant it.
Two neighbouring terms in the glossary concern where authority and freedom sit in an organisation. Decentralized management is the transfer of the right to take particular decisions from the top of an organisation to the levels below it, under a written and standing rule. Job autonomy is how much freedom the job itself leaves to the person holding it over how and when the work is done.
This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.
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