Empowerment is Not Just a Word

It would be hard to find any company or organisation that didn’t have promoting employee empowerment as an important goal. It sounds like the right thing to do. And we know that when we are truly empowered, we are more engaged, more productive and more committed to a successful outcome.

It isn’t just a case of working more efficiently to improve our own business results, customers want to work with partners where everyone is empowered to do the best job possible.

But empowerment isn’t easy.  The larger and more hierarchical the organisation, the harder it becomes. There’s a lot of trust involved on both sides

Empowerment can also be a vague aim. Empowered to do what, exactly? It’s also fragile and easily undermined – particularly when the pressure’s on. To be more than words, it has to be part of the culture and something the organisation lives.

Having people empowered to act in the customer’s best interests requires consistent priorities rooted in a strong and identifiable culture. It’s easy to say that you are customer focused, but what happens when customer priorities conflict with the need to hit revenue or profit targets or to keep shareholders happy?

Leading by Example

There’s also the question of the leadership behaviours that teams see happening every day. Are they encouraging, nurturing and supporting people to act in the right way and make decisions? Or are leaders dictating how things should be done without drawing on the knowledge and ideas of their team? It’s significant that these types of behaviours are increasingly being examined in the procurement process

Perhaps the trickiest issue is that empowerment isn’t just about the freedom to make decisions, it also means accepting accountability for the outcome – good or bad.

A family-owned business, like Osborne, has many advantages when it comes to empowerment and having the flexibility to truly put the customer first. For one thing, we’re not affected by shareholder pressure. As an agile and personal business, we also have a flatter structure. There’s greater accountability combined with shorter lines of communication to escalate contact and decision-making if required.

We also have a combined infrastructure team rather than siloed road and rail teams. Our customers benefit from teams with broader experience and easy access to specific knowledge where highways and rail networks intersect.

Empowerment is more than just a word and it’s never something we take for granted. We nurture it not because it helps us make more profit, but because we know it helps us consistently deliver better outcomes for our customers and makes us more secure as a business.