EMPLOYEE EMPOWERMENT

&
QUALITY MANAGEMENT
 PEOPLE POWER
• People most important asset. Your technologies,
products and structures can be copied by competitors.
No one, however, can match your highly charged,
motivated people who care.
• People are your firm's repository of knowledge and they
are central to your company's competitive advantage-
critical to the development and execution of strategies,
especially in today's faster-paced, more perplexing
world, where top management alone can no longer
assure your firm's competitiveness.
•
WHY EMPLOYEE EMPOWERMENT?

• People most underutilized resource.

• knowledge economy- INTRAPRENEURSHIP
• New knowledge-based enterprises characterized
by flat hierarchical structures and multi-skilled
workforce. Managers have to be facilitators. In
brief, managers work for their staff, and not the
reverse.
• Talented and empowered human capital is
becoming the prime ingredient of organizational
success.
WHY EMPLOYEE EMPOWERMENT?
• Successful teams, especially in knowledge-based enterprises,
are invested with a significant degree decision-making
authority.
• Employee empowerment changes the managers' mind-set
and leaves them with more time to engage in broad-based
thinking, visioning, and nurturing. This intelligent and
productive division of duties between visionary leaders,
focusing on emerging opportunities, and empowered
employees, running the business unit day to day provides for
a well-managed enterprise with strong growth potential.
 To foster Employee Empowerment

• Trust & Communicate with employees

• Evidence will not come across the board
with wide spread acceptance. A small
number will accept the invitation to become
more involved, say 3-5 per cent. The rest
will be watching every move to see what
happens
 To foster Employee Empowerment

• Leadership must diligently work to create the

work environment where it is obvious to all that
employee empowerment is desired, wanted and
cultivated.
• It is the large middle group that must be convinced
to practice employee empowerment.
• Give Signals that employees are valued- training ,
opportunities for personal growth, the solicitation
and implementation of ideas, the recognition and
reward system, promotion and advancement
 EI PM & EE
• Employee involvement and participative
management are often used to mean
empowerment. They are not really
interchangeable.
 EI PM & EE -Example
• The manager of the Human Resources department
added weeks to the process of hiring new employees
by requiring his supposedly "empowered" staff
members to obtain his signature on every document
related to the hiring of a new employee.
• John empowered himself to discuss the career
objectives he wished to pursue with his supervisor. He
told his supervisor, frankly, that if the opportunities
were not available in his current company, he would
move on to another company
 Case in Point: General Electric

• Some years ago, in locations throughout GE, local managers were

operating in an insulated environment with Chinese walls separating
them, both horizontally and vertically, from other departments and their
workforce. Employee questions, initiatives, and feedback were
discouraged.
• In the new knowledge-driven economy, Jack Welch, CEO, General
Electric, "viewed this as anathema. He believed in creating an open
collaborative workplace where everyone's opinion was welcome." He
wrote in a letter to shareholders: "If you want to get the benefit of
everything employees have, you've got to free them - make everybody a
participant. Everybody has to know everything, so they can make the
right decisions by themselves"...
Employee empowerment is a two sided coin.

• For employees to be empowered the management leadership must want

and believe that employee empowerment makes good business sense
and employees must act.
• Employee empowerment does not mean that management no longer has
the responsibility to lead the organization and is not responsible for
performance. If anything the opposite is true. Stronger leadership and
accountability is demanded in an organization that seeks to empower
employees. This starts with the executive leadership, through all
management levels and includes front line supervisors. It is only when
the entire organization is willing to work as a team that the real
benefits of employee empowerment are realized.
 PARADIGM SHIFT
• Employees not only strive for physiological
and self esteem needs but also derive
satisfaction from belonging to groups
• Motivate groups rather than individual as
• Stress on security, participation,
involvement and collaboration
 Why Employee Empowerment Fails

• pay lip service to empowerment, but do not really

believe in its power
• Managers don’t really understand what
empowerment means-philosophy or strategy that
enables people to make decisions about their job.
• fail to establish boundaries for empowerment
• undermine their faith in their personal
competence and in your trust, support
• failure to provide information and access.
 Six Practices Used to Help Empower and
Involve Employees
• Demonstrating top leadership commitment
• Engaging employee unions
• Training employee s to enhance their knowledge, skills,
and abilities.
• Using employee teams to help accomplish agency
missions.
• Training employees to enhance their knowledge, skills,
and abilities
• Involving employees in planning and sharing
performance information
• Delegating authorities to front-line employees
 EMPLOYEE EMPOWERMENT: A CRUCIAL
INGREDIENT IN A TOTAL QUALITY
MANAGEMENT STRATEGY.

• Quality starts with People.

• Participative management- more than a management
buzzword.
• We are all in it together
• Empower from the "bottom up".
• Employees- The most important asset in organizations
• Treat Your employees the way you want your
customers to be treated.
 TQM
• CREATING AN ORGANISATIONAL
CULTURE COMMITTED TO THE
CONTINUOS IMPROVEMENT OF
SKILLS, TEAMWORK, PROCESSES,
PRODUCT , SERVICE QUALITY AND
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
 OBJECTIVES OF TQM
• CUSTOMER REQUIREMENTS KEY TO ORG
SURVIVAL & GROWTH

• CONTINUOS IMPROVEMENT IN QUALITY

• DEVELOPING RELATIONSHIP IF OPENNESS

& TRUST
 COMPONENTS OF TQM
• CUSTOMER ORIENTATION

• CONTINUOS IMPROVEMENT

• EMPLOYEE INVOLVEMENT
REQUIREMENTS FOR SUCCESS OF TQM

• OBJECTIVES & POLICIES TO REFLECT

COMMITMENT TO QUALITY AS A PHILOSOPHY
• EFFECTIVE COMMUICATION TO ALL
• TQM PROGRAM PROPERLY DESIGNED
• ENCOURAGE PARTICIPATION
• TRAINING FOR EFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION
• INVOLVE PRODUCT DESIGN & IMPROVEMENT,
ADOPTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY, SYSTEMS &
PROCEDURES
• A CONTINUOS PROGRAM
 TQM IN INDIA
• 1980’s
• KAIZEN –view quality as an endless journey not
destination-experimenting, measuring, adjusting &
improving
• JUST IN TIME PRODUCTION & KANBAN SYSTEMS
( Smoothening production, providing process flexibility,
standardization of jobs, utilization & ordering /delivery
systems)
• EMPOWERMENT
• BENCHMARKING
• LEARNING ORGANISATIONS