Empowering employee decision-making for organisational success

Employee involvement is crucial for fostering positive changes in the workplace. It not only helps in overcoming resistance to change but also increases commitment, trust in management, and productivity. 

Forbes shares that letting employees help with decisions shows that you trust them. Empowering employees to make day to day decisions in their role builds trust with employees. Enabling staff input into wider business decisions builds support for change. 

According to the Fair Work Ombudsman, employees who have the opportunity to participate in the decision-making process are more likely to accept change and less likely to feel anxious or fearful. 

Surprisingly, despite its significance, employees often rate involvement as one of the aspects of work they are least satisfied with. 

In this blog, we explore 5 practical strategies to encourage employee involvement. 

Encourage employee decision-making 

Being consulted about important workplace decisions can improve an employee’s engagement with their work. Here are some ways on how you can involve your people to make your business stronger

1. ‍Encourage employee suggestions: Empower employees to make suggestions and implement changes to their daily work processes. Your employees may give you new ideas that you would have never thought of.‍
2. Ensure continuous change process: Ensure the organisation's change process is continuous, allowing for ongoing employee input.‍
3. Education and training: Educate and train employees, especially those new to offering ideas and making decisions of this nature.‍
4. Utilise organisational tools: To involve staff, use organisational surveys, suggestion schemes, continuous improvement systems, quality circles, and self-directed work teams. 

Provide clear organisational direction

Clearly communicate organisational and departmental plans and solicit input from your team on what they can do to help achieve them. 

1. ‍Communicate vision and strategy: Regularly communicate the vision and strategy of the organisation to employees.‍
2. Communicate on a departmental level: Managers should regularly reinforce the vision of the organisation and the goals of the department.‍
3. Empower autonomous decisions: Provide employees with the structure and information needed to make autonomous decisions and changes in line with their role and organisational goals.

Facilitate better communication

Fostering a culture of open communication, where information flows freely and regularly between all levels of the organisation, is key to success.

1. ‍Information flow: Facilitate information flow at all levels of the organisation.‍
2. Regular meetings: Set up meetings at least once a month for two-way communication between management and staff.‍
3. Open-Door policy: Maintain an open-door policy at work and use open-ended questions to elicit employee feedback.

Getting managers involved

Managers’ involvement and support towards their team members can be of great benefit to the company’s development.

1. ‍Supportive role: Managers can enhance teamwork by adopting a supportive role while relinquishing some authority, and fostering trust, collaboration, and innovation.‍
2. Encourage proactivity: Proactively encourage, pay attention to, and act on employees’ opinions.‍
3. Education and training: Encourage regular training for managers to improve and build on their views and behaviour if needed.

Develop structures for evaluation

Effective evaluations are crucial; here are a few steps:

1. ‍Build and review strategies: Develop and frequently review strategies to involve employees.‍
2. Evaluation process: Have an evaluation process in place to decide the value of each idea made by employees.‍
3. Provide feedback: Always respond to ideas without making promises that cannot be kept. Provide feedback on decisions where ideas were not implemented.

Conclusion

Employee consultation and involvement in decision-making are key to a successful and productive workplace. Xref Engage Surveys are customisable and can help you give your people a voice so they feel connected and involved in decision-making processes. Along with robust surveys that have been tested by thousands of organisations, the Xref Engage team has come with decades of experience as workplace psychologists and are here to help you curate your survey.

By encouraging employee decision-making, providing clear organisational direction, facilitating better communication, getting managers involved and developing structures for evaluation, organisations can empower their employees, to foster a culture of collaboration and innovation. 

Remember, involving staff takes time and effort, but the benefits far outweigh the challenges.

‍Contact us today if you would like to conduct an employee engagement survey.