Employee empowerment became one of the crucial approaches for companies to gain a competitive advantage. In this post, I will examine two companies that achieved the top positions in their respective industries through this method: Dell, Inc., and Google LLC. Starting with Dell’s success, it is possible to trace the link between change in the managerial approach and the company’s performance. Dell is known for its high-quality IT technologies, which would be impossible without the communal creative visions of all of its employees. The company has set special groups for its workers to encourage creative thinking in an environment that will be the most adapted to their needs (“Employee resource groups,” n.d.). Its employees are free to cooperate and share ideas with managers at any time via special employee resource groups (“Employee resource groups,” n.d.). Dell has aligned its hierarchy for this need to eliminate common constraints of time, pressure, and short-term goals set by managers.
For Google, innovation is the key priority in many of its projects. Many workplace policies in this company stem from this priority, as Google strives to give as much creative freedom to its employees a possible. Supervisors can be counterproductive, as they tend to diminish initiative and creativity with authoritarian views (Kotter, 2012). To avoid this pitfall, Google has eliminated this notion and allowed its employees to freely work on the projects they desired to contribute to (Luenendonk, 2019). Workers are encouraged to leave feedback, converse with any other worker, or group up with anyone within the company (Luenendonk, 2019). In conclusion, Google and Dell have given their workers as much space as was needed for creative thinking and comfortable work environments and continue to promote employee empowerment.
References
Employee resource groups. (n.d.). Digital Transformation – IT & Workforce Solutions | Dell Technologies US. Web.
Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Press.
Luenendonk, M. (2019). The Google way of motivating employees. Cleverism. Web.