Key to success for any company is efficiency. The degree of efficiency with which a company delivers marks it from the others in the same business and therein lies the rub.
The definition of efficiency in most of the companies is seen as a command-delivery relationship. The process of delivery in the sense of how an employee absorbs a specific command and links it to his role in the company does not go beyond lip service by the top brass of the company concerned.
In most of the companies, therefore, efficiency remains a perennial strategic issue that the top management grapples with. This not only bleeds the company in terms of engaging the top management’s precious time in reinventing the wheel, it also creates efficiency gap in a company’s strategy space by squeezing out productive thought time from the top brass of the company concerned.
The proposition here is simple – if a company’s top brass is preoccupied with the issue of efficiency it implies, ipso facto, that the company is inefficient and by further implication falls short of being considered a successful one. While these companies spend hours of cutting the t’s and dotting the i’s in ensuring an efficient work process, the solution actually lies in empowering the employees.
However, empowerment as an HR policy is easier said than implemented. Most of the owners of companies or the top brass entrusted with the work of running of the company concerned apprehend that empowerment may lead to indiscipline. Empirically it has been seen that a company that takes pain in properly empowering its employees not only gains in terms of improved efficiency, it also gets to earn deeper employee loyalty.
How does or should one go about it? Although the management science has struggled to find one rule applicable to all, that may not work. However, it is generally seen that in an organisation if an employee is just given a work goal and told what is expected of him, the process gets to evolve in a democratic dynamics. If there is a predefined structure, likely in an older company, the process-employee mapping happens through the path of least resistance where empowerment is the key word in running of a company.
To sum up, efficiency defined from the perspective of employee performance increases in an empowered environment. This tends to create ownership among the staff that ought to be the single most important objective for HR. Ownership creates loyalty which is a necessary condition for creation of efficiency.