subject: Preparing Today For The Future Scarce Labor Market Optimizing Employee Performance, Part 3 [print this page] In our last few articles we discussed attracting new employees. In part three we will discuss getting the most from your workforce. Unfortunately, many employers think the way you do this is to reduce staff and increase expectations!
In reality, the most effective way to optimize performance is to empower employees to do their jobs. I advocate the use of the 3D Employee Empowerment ModelTM as the most efficient and effective way to empower a workforce.
The 3D Employee Empowerment ModelTM combines the traditional organization-driven employee empowerment pull strategy, with the non-traditional employee-driven push strategy.
The traditional employee empowerment approach is shaped by two dimensions; the empowerment climate created by the employer and time. Traditional employee empowerment approaches focus on employers creating an empowerment climate that signals to employees that it is okay to behave in a more empowered way.
Over time, an empowerment climate facilitates empowering employees to higher levels of performance by removing the disincentives to employee empowerment behavior. With the disincentives removed, employees feel more empowered and began to behave in a more empowered manner.
Once a catalyst initiates the employer-driven empowerment change process; there are four types of employee adoption profiles that influence if and when, the change will be fully implemented and institutionalized. They were described by Hersey and Blanchard as a followers ability and motivation .
1.Organization employees that are early adopters i.e., those employees that want to change and can change, quickly began to behave in a more empowered manner. They have the knowledge, skills and abilities to emulate the desired behavior and prefer to behave in an empowered manner. They are also comfortable with leading change and migrating away from the majority culture.
2.Employees that can change but dont want to change, must be convinced that the new empowerment climate is real and here to stay, before they are motivated to modify their behavior, but will eventually adopt an empowered behavior.
3.Employees that believe they cannot change but want to change, require training and other support to develop the knowledge, skills and abilities to behave in a more empowered manner; however, without employee self-efficacy, employees will not internalize the training because they dont truly believe they can change; consequently, they will not be motivated to change. The two dimensional approach often does not provide enough support to fully modify this groups behavior.
4.Employees that believe they cannot change and do not want to change also require training and other support to develop the knowledge, skills and abilities to behave in a more empowered manner. Those employees must also improve self-efficacy in order to embrace and internalize the training.
Additionally, enough employees in the organization must adopt the empowerment behavior in order to create enough peer pressure to force this last group to adopt empowerment behaviors, or be out of step with the new empowerment culture. The two dimensional approach does not provide enough of this support or a high enough employee adoption percentage to fully modify this groups behavior.
The 3D Employee Empowerment ModelTM recognizes the power of personal empowerment as a supplement to the traditional employer-driven approach. For any empowerment initiative, the 3D Employee Empowerment ModelTM demonstrates the optimal effect over time, of combining the employer-driven and employee-driven approach.
In this model, the percentage of the organizations employees that have adopted the new employee empowerment behaviors is much higher than the adoption percentage of the traditional two dimensional model.
This is because the adoption of these behaviors is now defined by an employer-driven dimension on the vertical y axis, an employee-driven dimension on the z axis, and the time dimension on the horizontal x axis.
By including the third employee-driven empowerment dimension, we are exponentially increasing employee empowerment adoption in the organization because it effectively mobilizes the cant change but want to change and cant change and dont want to change employee groups.
When these groups needs are addressed, the percentage of the organizations employees that will adopt the new employee empowerment behaviors is a much greater portion of the organizations overall workforce.
Todays most effective and sustainable competitive advantage is optimizing employee productivity. Information, technology and operating processes all provide a competitive advantage but has not proved to be sustainable.
The companies that learn to optimize employee productivity by empowering employees to behave as though they own the company, will out perform their competitors for many years to come.
