Creating an Employee Empowerment Program in Your Organization

Employee empowerment gives employees more control over their work by giving them more autonomy, more responsibility, and more accountability for everything they do. It also frees up management to focus on more strategic tasks.

Between increasing AI adoption, the popularity of remote work, and increasingly decentralized hierarchies, employee empowerment is an essential response to evolving market trends. It allows your workplace to operate in a more agile way, freeing employees from the need to constantly check in with managers on every decision while allowing them the freedom to solve problems more creatively.

In this guide, you’ll learn about what employee empowerment looks like in practice, how you can put it into effect, and the benefits you’ll reap as a result.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand what employee empowerment is and why it matters.
• Explore the key benefits of employee empowerment for individuals and organizations.
• Learn how to build a sustainable employee empowerment program.
• Discover real-world employee empowerment examples and best practices.
• Understand what is necessary for the success of employee empowerment efforts.
• See how 15Five’s employee engagement and performance tools support workforce empowerment.

What is employee empowerment?

Employee empowerment means giving employees the ability to work in a self-directed way, with more authority over the decisions that impact their day-to-day work. It’s the natural counter to micromanagement, giving employees more autonomy and allowing managers to dedicate their focus to more important tasks than just keeping tabs on their direct reports.

That said, employee empowerment extends beyond mere delegation, which is simply managers reassigning tasks to employees. True employee empowerment means trusting them to take on a task from start to finish, along with the responsibilities that come with it. That might involve reporting on a task’s progress to relevant stakeholders, autonomously checking in with collaborators, and building up their project management skills.

Managers have a direct hand in making sure their teams have the tools they need to handle this additional responsibility. That can mean giving them access to the right project management tools or databases, as well as helping them train up the skills they need to stay autonomous.

While employee empowerment is always about giving employees more autonomy at its core, it can take a few different forms in practice:

• Self-managed teams, in which employees take on the lion’s share of the planning and strategy roles for their work, with only occasional guidance from managers as needed.
• Decision-making authority, which allows employees to make important decisions on their own, without always needing approval from a manager.
• Idea implementation ownership, in which employees own their ideas from their initial inception to their final implementation.
• Workplace autonomy, allowing employees to choose how they get their work done, in a way that suits them best.

The benefits of employee empowerment

Employee empowerment doesn’t just reduce a manager’s workload and counter micromanagement. When applied throughout your organization, you’ll see a widespread impact that makes a difference:

• Improved employee engagement and morale: Employee engagement describes the commitment and passion employees have towards their role. Empowering them to have more autonomy and control over what they do can stir passion and satisfaction for their work, improving engagement. Likewise, a culture that empowers employees can lead to higher morale across the board, as they feel in control of their work rather than simply handling tasks dispatched to them.
• Increased productivity and innovation: Productivity has to be built on a solid foundation. It doesn’t come from just using tools and to-do lists. When employees own more of their work, they can tailor their tasks to their work style, ensuring that the responsibilities they take on happen at a time and in a way that allows them to hit peak productivity. Additionally, being empowered to take on more responsibility means they’re more aware of what’s going on outside their own work, giving them more opportunities to contribute to broader initiatives.
• Stronger retention and employee loyalty: According to Gallup data, 37% of people who left a job in 2024 did so for engagement and culture reasons, like a lack of development opportunities or their work no longer interesting them. When employees are empowered, they’re given opportunities to build up their skills as well as tailor their work to what they’re interested in, which leads to greater retention.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction: No customer likes feeling like their requests are being passed from department to department, with no one seemingly responsible for resolving their issue. Employee empowerment has a special advantage in customer support and other customer-facing roles, since agents are given more agency to proactively resolve issues rather than always escalating them.
• Better leadership development and succession planning: Leadership roles are incredibly difficult and expensive to hire for, especially when you factor in the lengthy onboarding needed for a leader to become familiar with your organization. Employee empowerment is the stepping stone to leadership development, which promotes the development of leadership skills throughout your org chart and gives you a steady pipeline of potential leaders.

What is necessary for employee empowerment to succeed?

Employee empowerment requires more than just a mindset shift from managers, especially in organizations that previously relied on close supervision for every task. To truly succeed in empowering your employees—and reap the benefits mentioned above—make sure you have the following:

• Clear expectations and goals: What are you empowering employees for? Do you want to reduce management’s workload so they can take on more strategic work? Or do you want to upskill employees, perhaps ahead of deploying AI throughout your company? Empowering employees means you need to be transparent with them about what your ultimate goal is, so they can align their efforts with yours.
• Supportive leadership: Employee empowerment requires buy-in from every level of your organization. All it takes is a single leader to request a report from a manager instead of the employee who’s supposed to own a task in order for an entire empowerment effort to stall. Managers also need resources to properly empower their direct reports, and that requires support from leadership.
• Open communication: Employee empowerment is heavily dependent on open, transparent communication. Managers need to trust that they can get accurate updates from their direct reports, while employees need to know they can be open about whatever they’re struggling with as they take on more ownership over their work.
• Access to training and resources: Employees need significant support as they begin taking on more strategic responsibilities, and your organization needs to be ready to provide that support. That can involve training on specific skills, access to experts, coaching sessions, and extra feedback loops.
• Recognition and accountability: When someone excels in their new empowered capacity, recognize it as publicly as possible. Use them as an example for other employees you seek to empower. Likewise, help employees become more accountable for all the work they do, which includes owning up to and fixing mistakes.

Building an employee empowerment program

Empowering employees to take more ownership of their work and act more autonomously requires organization-wide change. Here’s a step-by-step process you can follow to start implementing this with your teams.

Assess your current culture

Does your current company culture support employee empowerment? Better yet, do your employees believe that your culture can support this? Employee empowerment can only work in organizations where trust, transparency, and open communication are valued.

So how do you assess your company culture? Survey tools, like 15Five’s Engage, are a great way to get the pulse on your company culture and how it actually supports employees on the ground.

Define empowerment goals

What is your main objective? How will you measure your progress towards it? For organizations that prioritize leadership development and succession planning, employee empowerment will look very different than for teams that want to prioritize agility and autonomy.

Train managers to empower their teams

Managers have a key role to play in employee empowerment. Not only are they responsible for giving employees the resources they need to own more of their work, but they’re the front line for handling any problems that pop up along the way.

That’s why a performance management platform like 15Five Perform is an essential part of your employee empowerment strategy. It allows you to set goals for managers, track progress, and report on their performance company-wide.

Create structures for feedback and growth

Employee empowerment requires training and feedback for both employees and managers. Weekly check-ins allow managers to review work from employees without sliding into micromanagement, while continuous feedback loops allow employees to let their managers know how they can best be supported.

Tools like 15Five automate the majority of this process, allowing you to focus on the content of your feedback rather than getting it done just right.

Give employees decision-making power

Employee empowerment only works if employees have actual decision-making power. That can mean having actual input into what work they take on, influencing strategy, or choosing how they collaborate with other teams. It can be inherently risky, especially in some organizations where this kind of trust isn’t common, but it’s essential.

Recognize and iterate

Giving recognition to employees who excel when you empower them, and make it as public as possible. This gives you success stories helpful for getting buy-in from leadership and other employees alike.

But both employees who succeed and those who struggle once empowered should be consulted as you work on your employee empowerment process. This will give you the information you need to iterate and find a better process.

How 15Five supports employee empowerment

15Five is a performance management platform that gives data-driven HR professionals the technology they need to align HR initiatives with business goals and increase alignment throughout their organization. As a performance management platform, it’s also a perfect launching off point for your employee empowerment strategy. 15Five offers a variety of features that can completely transform the way you plan and carry out this essential process:

• Engage: 15Five gives you what you need to carry out employee engagement surveys and use the results to measure engagement over time. For employee empowerment, this gives you the data you need to create a link between your empowerment process and employee engagement.
• Perform: With 15Five, your review cycles don’t have to come with a mountain of paperwork and the ensuing administrative burden. Tailor reviews to your company culture, improve accountability, and make data-driven performance decisions.
• Transform: A blended learning solution and content library allows you to systematize manager and employee training at scale, making employee empowerment a smoother, more standardized process.

Want to see what 15Five can do for your employee empowerment process? Book a demo now.

Empower employees to achieve more

Your employees will achieve greater things if they have more ownership over their work. Meanwhile, their managers will be freed from the burden of micromanagement, giving them the ability to focus on more strategic work. Employee empowerment requires an investment, a mindset shift, and buy-in from leadership. But, when done right, it will lead to greater employee engagement, more employee retention, and greater achievements throughout your org chart.

Ready to empower your employees? Explore how 15Five can help transform your culture from the ground up in this demo.