Empowerment: From Employees to Allies

A Lean management philosophy, inspired by the famous Toyota System, has the basic principle of offering customers only the value they want, eliminating everything that is considered waste. Among the best known practices is the use of the pull production system, in which production is only triggered after the customer's request. However, eliminating unnecessary inventory is not the only waste that Lean fights. Philosophy also seeks to eliminate another type of waste, which has gained more importance recently: Intellectual. This waste can be defined as not using the creative potential and skills and knowledge of the company's employees.

To avoid this, Lean promotes a culture of accountability, where employees have a voice and a more active role in the production process through greater autonomy and attribution of responsibilities. The greater delegation of attributions to employees also allows managers to be able to focus their efforts on facts that are truly critical and demand greater attention. This practice is closely related to a management technique known as women empowerment.

O women empowerment seeks to give people enough freedom and information so that they can make decisions and actively participate in the organization. Among the many benefits of women empowerment, Oliveira and Rodriguez highlight:

• Freeing up managers' time, allowing them to dedicate more time to essential activities that really deserve attention;
• Contribution to the development of employees, as it induces opportunities that allow people to take initiative, solve problems, innovate, manage and make decisions;
• Emergence of a motivating environment throughout the organization, as it implicitly conveys the message that subordinates are considered trustworthy and whose development deserves respect;
• Agility of the decision due to the transfer of powers from superior departments to professionals who work, mainly, in the final part of the production chain, promoting customer satisfaction;
• Cost savings due to the reduction in the number of people and departments involved in decision making.

The famous hotel chain The Ritz-Carlton Company, recognized worldwide for the high level of service offered to customers, has women empowerment one of its bases. Company founder Cesar Ritz set the standard for luxury in European hotels in the early XNUMXth century. He said, “Never say no when a customer asks for something, even if they ask for the moon. You can always try.”

The Ritz-Carlton refers to its more than 40 employees as "ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen". In order to thrive with a discerning clientele in a luxury segment, they bank their credits on a bottom-up entry. Each of the “ladies and gentlemen” in your service operation is empowered to spend $2.000 onsite to resolve a guest's issue. The employee to whom the complaint or request was made immediately “owns” it and is automatically authorized to do whatever is necessary to resolve the matter.

Figure 1 – Ritz-Carlton in Abu Dhabi

Source: visual.energy.

The $2.000 doesn't have to be spent just in case of problems. On the contrary, in general, employees use this amount to surprise guests. There are both cases of employees who used the amount to buy cake and champagne for customers who were celebrating a special date, as well as an employee at the Dubai branch who, upon hearing a guest in a wheelchair regretting not being able to go to the beach, requested construction of a wooden path to the edge of the sea especially so that he could get close to the water.

At the Ritz-Carlton, every employee contributes to the running of the hotel and plays a key role in every guest's stay. The decision to empower every employee to resolve every grievance resulted in an increase in individual pride and achievement, producing a more enthusiastic and satisfied workforce and a more loyal customer base. In the operations area, Fedex used a similar expedient to greatly reduce its cost of paying guarantees for non-compliance with delivery times.

Although greater delegation of powers to employees means greater complexity, this tends to have a positive impact on team motivation and engagement, as employees feel challenged and see themselves as an integral part of the process. When the employee is engaged and motivated, the possibilities for him to contribute to the company and become an ally of managers in the search for improvements in the process increase significantly. At the same time, the leaders are able to dedicate themselves more to issues considered of great relevance, as the leader does not have to resolve details that often become a routine and that could be solved by the employees themselves who, because they are in greater numbers and more closer to the problems, they are able to solve them more quickly.