What are the benefits of employee autonomy? What does it mean to give employees authority in certain aspects of the business?
Horst Schulze states that if you want motivated employees, they need to feel like they have the authority to personally improve the business on a daily basis. This doesn’t mean handing them the keys to the business, but you can offer them the power to solve problems on their own.
Check out why you should step aside and give your employees a chance to prove themselves.
Grant Employees Authority to Improve the Business
Managers don’t always offer employee autonomy: Often, employees are told they have to follow strict operational procedures or pass problems off to a manager rather than creatively solving problems themselves. In contrast, Schulze gives every one of his employees at the Ritz-Carlton permission to spend up to $2,000 in any way that keeps a hotel guest satisfied with their experience, without pre-approval of any kind.
(Shortform note: $2,000 may seem like an unreasonably high amount of money for employees to spend to fix a single issue. However, experts explain that the average Ritz-Carlton customer is projected to spend $250,000 at Ritz-Carlton hotels over the course of their lifetime—so if a $2,000 investment can preserve a customer relationship, it pays off in the long run.)
Giving employees this authority is inherently motivating, says Schulze. When workers feel like management respects and trusts them to judge how best to serve the customer, they’ll want to work hard to live up to their managers’ expectations.
Schulze argues that giving all employees authority is particularly effective because frontline workers have the best vantage point to identify problems and solutions. They’re closer to the customers than managers or owners, so they often have a better sense of how to improve the customer experience.
If every employee is obligated to fix every flaw with your business or customer problem they encounter (even if it’s technically outside of their job description), your business will, over time, offer an increasingly high-quality customer experience. For example, a janitor in a dentist’s office might notice that the waiting area magazines are outdated and worn. If given authority, the janitor could remove the old magazines and buy new, fresh reading options to make the waiting area more inviting for customers.
| Build a Culture of Trust According to Charles Duhigg in Smarter Better Faster, the idea that frontline employees should be given the authority to solve problems they encounter is a core tenet of a management philosophy called lean manufacturing, which was developed at Toyota. Like Schulze, Duhigg contends that workers need to feel like management trusts and respects them before they take the initiative to improve the business. Furthermore, Duhigg warns that if workers don’t feel like management trusts and respects them, they’ll be too afraid of making mistakes—and being punished for them—to use the authority they have. For this reason, Duhigg argues that before workers can proactively solve problems for the business, managers must create a “commitment culture”—a workplace environment where managers are genuinely invested in their employees’ success and will support them even if they make mistakes. To do this, Duhigg recommends investing in long-term employee training, providing generous benefits, and reserving layoffs as a last resort. |
