Employee Empowerment: The Key to Employee Satisfaction

The sense of satisfaction, and the associated happiness, that accompanies the feeling of being in control is one is that is unmatched. This is, not surprisingly, true also in the workplace, perhaps even more so than in other spheres of life. Promotion of employee satisfaction is what employee empowerment aims at achieving in the workplace, and has done for a while now with panache.

Let’s now take a closer look at what exactly happens in an organization when a conscious decision to empower employees is taken.

A Primer on ESS and its Benefits

Employee Self-Service or ESS, a feature that comes bundled with modern cloud HR software, empowers employees by making much if not all of an employee’s information is readily available to him/her at the click of a button. This increases the sense of ownership that employees possess over their own information, ranging from basic employee information to tax-related information and leave and attendance data.

The variables here such as leaves, it has been found, often remain within desirable limits once such information is made readily available to employees.

Employee self-service allows access to leaves taken by an employee, allows employees to apply for leave and also view leave balances and the company’s holiday list readily. Attendance information too is readily accessible in real-time when using software for the attendance management system.

This allows employees to plan their days better and the company also enjoys complete employee attendance information – all in real-time. Critical payroll data is also made known to employees at a location they can easily access through their browsers.

As a result of all this, it has been found that queries from employees to HR surrounding leave, attendance, payroll, and payslip information reduce sharply, leaving your HR free to attend to more strategic, business-critical tasks.

Other Positive Fallouts

Such ready access to employee information has numerous positive fallouts apart from the direct impacts such as employee empowerment and information availability that result from it.

Time and attention, in our age, are expensive commodities that are traded feverishly on the market. An HR and payroll software with employee self-service can free up time for your HR as well as employees, lead to a reduction of low-quality work which can easily be handled by an automated system such as software. This, in turn, results in a higher quality of work being doled out to your HR, leading to increased HR retention from more learning opportunities and challenging work on the job.

Employee satisfaction rises dramatically as employees can now plan their work and off days better, not to mention finances. They can now create their own work schedules and goals, which they naturally feel more obliged to stick to than one imposed upon them by the authority.

Such encouragement of self-motivation leads to a better perception of the company in the employees’ minds and also improves work delivery.

The goodies don’t end there. As explained above, empowerment leads to happier employees, which in turn gives rise to higher productivity. This also results in the elimination of the need for micromanagement, resulting in higher management productivity. This results in a direct drop in the labor costs incurred by the organization.

An old adage rings true in the context of employee empowerment…